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    Muriel Rukeyser responded to the American jitters in a poetry collection published in 1938,   US1. The book is most famous for the “documentary’ poems known as the “Book of the Dead.” Like other artists at that time – I am thinking of Dorothea Lange’s pictures of Great depression miseries, or James Agee’s Let us now praise famous men - Muriel Ruykeyser saw in the Depression not only a great rebuke to capitalism, but, as well, to the modernist focus on a certain sort of subject – infinitely cultivated, infinitely melancholy – and sought to bring modernist shock tactics into the field, so to speak. Modernist shock was out there in the tools and industry. The book of the dead is based on a typical bit of All American skunkery: a company, Dennis and Rinehart, hired miners in West Virginia to drill a tunnel under a mountain to divert a river to an electric plant. Discovering that there was a mass of silicate heavy rock under the mountain, the company – wanting to exploit the silica –

  Anti-fascist seems like a bland title, at least in the U.S. After all, the mythology of American power was based on the largest anti-fascist operation in history, called World War II. Alas, after world war II the U.S. decided to make a sort of posthumous alliance with many many Nazis, who were invited into the war against the Soviets. From the mass murdering scientists who tested poison gasses at Ausschwitz to Eichman's chief subordinate, these characters came to the U.S. and even gained cover stories via a CIA that has never released all its records on this part of American history. There are many books about this. One of them, The Nazis next door by Eric Lichtbau, chronicles the career of America's first antifa agitator in the Cold War: guy named Chuck Allen. A wasp, a lefty, and an organizer of protests against Nazis, who were now just "anti-communists" - which, according to the FBI, which spied on him, made Allen a communist. He didn't give a fuck. His demon

  I spent the 00s in a froth of indignation, and my frothing found a home on my blog. But no matter how I whipped the hypocrisy, cretinism and downright pig ignorance of Bush’s administration and the general bipartisan DC foreign policy set, I got no satisfaction – it just went on and on, through the blood and mire, until gradually the seachange came, we all agreed Iraq was a mistake, and we all agreed to forget all about it. The Obama administration letting the CIA burn its little torture tapes in order to decide that it couldn’t, like, judicially do anything about torturers (just as it couldn’t find a single bankster to prosecute in that unfortunate 2008 financial meltdown thingy) should have taught me a lesson: the plebs will never be heard. Ever ever ever. So I am doing my best to ignore the hilarious islamo-gauchiste campaign in France, even to the extent of deciding not to finish the incredibly dumb, no good, absolutely disqualifying rant of Pierre Jourde, late of Commentaire,