My Bedbound Era + "It's Sussex!" + Euphoria Returns + Economic Blackouts + Women's History Month + Remembering Wadea + America and Ukraine + Roberta Flack
💵Thank you
for including me in your newsletter this week! 💵Somewhere there is a witch who finally pulled my jar off the shelf and decided it was time to terrorize me. Release the spell, pleaseeeeee. Free me.
Last week, I learned I have a near-deadly allergy to either mold, or moldy freeze-dried beef liver dog treats. Ya girl almost met God. Never had anaphylaxis on my bingo card, but nothing truly surprises me at this point. Truly. Some advice, if you notice a funky, moldy smell (worse than beef liver’s usual) don’t hold the pack up to your eye multiple times to inspect it, or huff it right up under your nose. Don’t do that. The lips will swell, the eyes will swell, the throat will start closing, and then your heartbeat will quadruple, and you’ll be like, well, RIP me.
A little time in the ER and a mystery steroid shot later and I was feeling fab. The shot made my immune system very teeny, very tiny, very petite, and very demure, as the side effects list warned, and I got some form of whatever flu going around and was laid out for another week. I might need to reconvene with the Allergy chapter of the #culturework_army on a separate thread.
Also, I think I might go back to TikTok this week. I don’t think it’s healthy for anyone to produce content every day, let alone stare at themselves constantly. I crept back onto TikTok last week, just to lurk, and everyone was still absolutely crashing out. I can’t make self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-preservation contagious, all I can do is write this newsletter!
Anyway, shoutout to daylight savings and no more 5PM darkness!
This is basically it, right? (@MichaelParvano)
Euphoria is back, baby! (TikTok)
Halle, Everyone Saw This Coming (@Shawnda)
The Fifth Edition of Desert X Is Here (DesertX.org)
Re-train Your Consumerism, For Good (culturework)
Prada to buy Versace? (Bloomberg)
Gayle King, Your Ancestors Are Telling You To Not Go (CBS)
Celebrity Hairdresser Jesus Guerrero Dies At 34 (NBC)
Stop Sending My Boyfriend Photos! (Jezebel)
RIP Mr. Carl Dean, The Greenest Green Flag (NYT)
I told you that all billionaires are actually IRL super-subs (Buzzfeed)
Gene Hackman, Wife, and Dog Mysteriously Found Dead (CNN)
Neo-Soul Queen Angie Stone Dies in Alabama Car Crash (NPR)
Happy belated International Women’s Day to everyone except the women who chose to weirdly post their minor daughters onto the internet. Surely there are consenting adult women, and not girls, in your life who you can brag to internet strangers about…
Anyway, last month I warned that we were in the very last Black History Month ever. I also thought this would be the last Women’s History Month this country would ever celebrate. But, just this week President Donald Rump signed an executive order creating Women’s History Month, even though it already existed and was acknowledged and celebrated for nearly 40 years (thanks Jimmy Carter). So, yeah, America is back, or something. Now that we all feel great, let me bring you back down to earth.
In the illustration above is enslaved teenager and postpartum mother Anarcha Westcott, who was subjected to over thirty unanesthetized and unconsented medical experiments in the backyard “hospital” of slaver and physician J. Marion Sims, the man depicted in front of her with arms crossed. Sims’ legacy is padded for white comfort and remembers him as the “father of modern gynecology.” Anesthetics, like ether and chloroform, were readily available and in industry-wide use, but Sims intentionally withheld them from his enslaved “patients.” Despite the torture, trauma, and mutilation endured by Anarcha and others, ethical medical care for Black women is still, nearly 200 years later, fatally insufficient.
This month, be aware of the girl bosses who warn that The Handmaid’s Tale is coming, even though young Anarcha’s story proves it’s very much here.
For the last 17 months, I’ve had one post pinned to the top of my Substack. The post, titled “Let The World See What They Did,” is named specifically for the words of Mamie Till, words evoked by Illinois Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman as he led the community in the mourning of six year old Wadea Al-Fayoume. The American child was murdered after pro-Zionist and Islamophobic propaganda warned of an imaginary and absolutely fucking stupid “Day of Jihad” that never happened. Rhetoric intentionally and irresponsibly engineered by American media after October 7th to radicalize and re-awaken anti-Muslim hatred, in an effort to dehumanize Palestinians, and preemptively numb us to the incoming horrors of Israel’s genocidal campaign. Wadea was stabbed twenty-six times with a 12 inch knife. The knife’s seven inch blade still lodged in his body when first responders arrived.
The man who murdered Wadea and gravely injured his mother was their landlord Joseph Czuba. A man who would regularly check-in on the family and even bring toys to Wadea, before the media-driven paranoia set in. On February 28, he was found guilty and will be sentenced in May.
Americans, please please please don’t ever make the mistake of believing your own propaganda! It was never “American Stands With Ukraine” and was always going to be “America Stands On Ukraine,” just like America does to every country. “America,” if I’m being specific, does not and will not include you until you participate in it. As long as you hand off your governance to well-funded heroes and she-roes with good marketing and celebrity endorsements and continue to zone out in the time gaps between election cycles, nothing will change.
I sat on the internet like the rest of the world and watched Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine play out live across social media. I watched that country’s police, taxi, citizen population, and transit systems abandon Black people, mostly African students, as they joined the race to evacuate. I watched those students’ live videos, their terrifying interactions. I watched them beg. I watched them wait for train after train and be told trains were for “Ukrainians only.” I watched them have to walk for dozens of miles, dragging their belongings in a like -3 degree Eastern Bloc winter. I watched the total societal abandonment, the immediate relegation into second class citizenry, and a “young modern democracy” revert to Jim Crow segregation in just hours. I watched all of it with my own eyes. That’s all I’m gonna say about this.
Well, there’s more to say actually. There is some irony in America demanding Ukraine handover the mines, ore, and oil in exchange for protection. It’s not even protection. It’s just an indentured state of colonialism. And now what, you’ve got two feuding superpowers competing for who gets to bleed you dry. America, Russia, Ukraine. France, Belgium, Congo.
Welcome to the club, I guess.
I’m convinced history is just one episode of the same show that’s been playing on a loop for 500 years, and folks would rather watch the loop than simply read the Cliff Notes version Black and Indigenous people have taped up on the wall in large font. White nationalism and white supremacy will save no one.
Elsewhere…
Israel blocks aid to Gaza, breaching the ceasefire “deal” for the 200th+ time
Trump updates his “tariff plan” to just “tariff threats,” Canada and Mexico don’t care
“There is literally no one” - Lake Tahoe, MAGA’s leisure center, now has no staff
I’m surprised he didn’t just announce “Americanish” as a whole new language
World War III will have to wait … the Pentagon has to, um, clean up it’s social media accounts first
Jeff Bezos admits what we already knew: he bought a newspaper to propagandaize his biz interests
I spent the early part of my career working at a music magazine called SPIN. It had a