Iowa Bluffs

|

This piece was originally published on October 4, 2023 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing. Crossing the Mississippi River from Illinois into Iowa by car is an almost effortless glide, eliding entirely the forceful pull of the Great River and the centuries of violence greater still that harnessed its bucking current into an engine of commerce unsuitable for fishing, swimming, or drinking. It’s difficult to imagine that this momentary glimpse of blue in my peripheral vision was once the artery from which fortunes gushed or trickled, the playground where the nineteenth century’s Saint Hucks found death and adventure, and the vanishing horizon for the freedom of enslaved people sent ever-southward as the human traffic on which this nation’s wealth was built drew the entire southern social order into its own death spiral.

CATREGORIES:


Middle Class War: A Visit to Staten Island’s Autonomous Zone

This piece was originally published on December 20, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing. Transmission rates are on the rise again in New York City. Hospital beds are filling, the temperature is dropping, and most have accepted a renewed lockdown to be a foregone conclusion. But the talk of the town has been a humble pub on Staten Island’s East Shore pushing against the trend. As the transmission rate in the vicinity pushed it into the “orange zone,” Mac’s Public House declared last month it would not abide by a state-mandated closure but instead stay open with a “suggested donation” model intended to skirt business regulations.

CATEGORIES:

“The Last Stand of Freedom in America”

This piece was originally published on December 9, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing. “How many of you have an easy life?” the speaker asked the audience. To his dismay a handful of people raised their hands. “Well, okay, I guess some of you have it good, but many of you clearly don’t.” His voice could be barely heard and the audience shouted at him to speak into the microphone. They were gathered to express their defiance at the voter fraud that cost Donald Trump the 2020 election.

CATEGORIES:

Thankful for President Trump: Thanksgiving with Stop the Steal

This piece was originally published on November 29, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing. On Thanksgiving morning supporters of President Trump’s doomed reelection effort descended on the Loop neighborhood of Chicago to raise the battle cry “Stop the Steal!” The “steal” in this tortured locution is the purported Democratic Party theft of the November presidential election, chronicled in a convoluted conspiracy theory that one conservative federal judge recently compared to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” as it is “haphazardly stitched together.”

The Show Must Go On

This piece was originally published on September 30, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing. “It’s so great that we are all together in one place,” a middle-aged white woman gushed, almost directly in my ear. “Trump was sent by God!” I had other theories, but she was right about one thing. Donald Trump’s “Great American Comeback Tour” had brought me and roughly a thousand other souls together, far too closely for comfort, in Mosinee, Wisconsin – Trump country – as part of the President’s strategy to rally the hard-core of his electoral base leading up to the November election.

CATEGORIES:

DOWNFALL! Trump in the Bunker

This piece originally ran on June 3, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing. The image of the clot Trump being whisked by Secret Service agents into the White House underground bunker last Friday night (May 29th) to avoid the protests is a satirist’s dream come true.   Excuse me for letting fly here. What first comes to mind is the German 2004 film Downfall.  It chronicles the last days of Hitler, Eva Braun, and the top surviving Nazi henchmen (including Josef Goebbels and his entire family) in the Berlin Bunker. 

From the Archives


Homesick for a Place That Doesn’t Exist


Whether we realize it or not, we all need a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a place to call home. A place that, no matter where else we find ourselves, 50 miles away or halfway around the globe, always calls us back to it.

Even those of us who live in the atomized, hyperindividualistic …

CATEGORIES:

Hymns and Arias – Rugby in Wales

“Rugby is a wonderful show: dance, opera and, suddenly, the blood of a killing.” Richard Burton – Welsh actor There’s this old gag. Elvis Presley, James Brown and Tom Jones go fishing together in a small boat on the ocean.  The craft gets capsized and they are all swallowed up by a gigantic whale. Deep …

CATEGORIES:

READ MORE FROM THE HARD CRACKERS ARCHIVES