Voters in Ireland have elected the independent socialist Catherine Connolly to be president. Connolly is a critic of NATO who has accused the United States and Britain of enabling genocide in Gaza. She spoke to supporters in Dublin on Saturday.
President-elect Catherine Connolly: “I will be a president who listens and who reflects and who speaks when it’s necessary, and a voice for peace, a voice that builds on our policy of neutrality, a voice that articulates the existential threat posed by climate change.”
We are at war with Iran, we are not at war with Iran. Federal lands are for sale, the sale of federal lands is prohibited. The tariffs are back, the tariffs are over. Foreign students are banned, foreign students can stay. Trump rebuffs Israel, Trump will defend Israel to the death.
To the death, to our death: the threat of death is the constant. Nothing is real except awful things that don’t stop growing and don’t backtrack. Death is behind the drapes you draw down like a gunfight you already lost. The temperature hits 100 and makes you remember when the world had centuries instead of one endless day.
The heat will not relent. Why should it when nothing else will?
Politics is a jigsaw seesaw with a push and pull that cuts. Every policy is retracted and reinstated so that you can no longer remember relief. What were its ingredients — time, promises? She inhaled a sigh of relief, you think, but all you inhale is heat. You open the front door and stick out your head and breathe like Sylvia Plath.
Slam the door: you have a choice. Slam the door on that cannonball sun.
If you could have one hour, only one hour, in the cool natural air, just one hour when things were not wrong, you could make it through the week. You imagine a lemonade stand run by children selling RELIEF to adults, pouring it into paper cups, and a line of adults so long it bests the record-breaking No King’s Day rally that everyone forgot after the King announced we were at war.
The King has proclaimed we are not at war with Iran anymore because The King Won (shhhh keep telling him that.) But his backers proclaim we are at war with a nice 33-year-old man who wants to do good deeds and has assembled a massive following.
Things don’t tend to work out well for fellows like that, especially against the forces backing The King. You take some comfort that this fellow is not a carpenter.
* * *
The air feels like an oven, but New York produced a spark. New York, of all places, gave America hope with the platform of Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. We are so used to New Yorkers taking — The Trumps, The Cuomos, The Kushners, Carl Icahn, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin, Jeffrey Epstein, Eric Adams, Bernard Kerik (RIP!), Wall Street — that it is odd when they offer something good. Affordable housing, cheap childcare, relief.
Rich New Yorkers compared the prospect of these policies to Kristallnacht.
Rich New Yorkers whined about their personal safety while powerbrokers threatened Mamdani with deportation. When they were mocked as coddled losers, they changed the narrative, claiming Mamdani, a Muslim, threatened heartland states like mine, Missouri. But the lead article on the day Mamdani won was about how much rural Missourians are enjoying the new halal menu at the Stuckey’s in Doolittle.
Zohran Mamdani has a buddy named Brad Lander who ran as a sort of co-pilot in New York’s ranked mayoral race. Lander is from St. Louis, which means he has seen affordable housing and free institutions firsthand. He can testify to New Yorkers that they are real.
Lander left St. Louis long before Wesley Bell won the most expensive race in district history with money from hard-right Zionist PACs posing under fake names like “Progressives for Missouri.” AIPAC and other lobbyists did not care about Bell or about St. Louis. Their only goal was to oust Cori Bush, who had condemned Israel’s murderous policies. The “election” was a sad spectacle. I would complain to my representative, but I don’t have representation.
There are so many terrible New Yorkers to primary, but if Lander feels homesick, we’ve got one here too.
Mamdani’s victory was a primary upset win over former governor and unrepentant sex pest Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is part of a legal team representing Benjamin Netanyahu against ICC charges of war crimes. The team was assembled by Alan Dershowitz, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Rich people who liked Epstein also like Cuomo, a fellow predator and death merchant. They need Cuomo to hold office and keep secrets.
Mamdani, unlike Cuomo, would not perform subservience to Israel, no matter how many times punditstried. Mamdani has secrets too: like that a city can uplift its own people instead of functioning as a hub for a wealthy criminals tied to foreign states.
Rich New Yorkers are panicking because that was never a secret. It only felt like one because hardly anyone powerful said it out loud.
I’m worried Mamdani will be murdered. I’m worried he’s another faker. I’m worried he will spur a political cult, and that worry has already been vindicated: the shredding of the American monoculture has ensured every politician has a cult. Politics is the only shared pastime, which is why American life feels miserable, because the stakes are so high, and the quality of programming so low.
* * *
The heat wave hit New York. I wondered how it would affect the election. I wondered if Mamdani would win and billionaires would sue the sun. I wouldn’t rule it out.
When heat waves get this bad, the smallest effort drains you. You can feel the whole country wilting, wilting against its collective will. New Yorkers voted anyway.
I’ve said time and time again that you can’t vote out the mafia, and that’s true. But you can try not voting in the mafia. It won’t change everything. But it’s a start.
Today’s mafia is transnational but not ethnic. Its criminals have multiple passports and offshore accounts and no national allegiances. To them, countries are land masses to be stripped and sold for parts. Transnational organized crime knows no geographical bounds — but it has key hubs, and New York City is one of them.
It does not have to be. New York has been that way so long, people accept it, even take pride in it. Elite criminal impunity is New York’s currency. But what if it wasn’t? What if London and Moscow followed suit?
People fear a system crashing down because they don’t understand that it already happened and they’ve been living in wreckage sold to them as privilege. Or they understand just fine, and do not know what to do about it.
The earth is screaming. It has heat exhaustion. I do too, as I write this out, ride this out, waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for the sun to set on plutocrat thieves, waiting for the sun to set me free. Waiting for the day I greet sunrise not with dread at uncertain hours, but relief at the dawn of possibility.
* * *
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Photo of a sunset I took on a nice day in 2022. What, you think I’m going out in this weather to get another?!
Nick Cave and Bob Dylan (hoodie) at Glastonbury 1988 (Bleddeyn Butcher photo)
Q: Have you ever imagined that Bob Dylan would be attending your shows and writing nice tweets about them? [ John, NYC]
Dear John,
Sitting in bed with Susie in a post-tour stupor, watching ‘Carry On Up the Khyber’ and eating Belgian chocolates (gift from a fan),my phone suddenly lit up as excited friends started sending me Bob Dylan’s tweet–
‘Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accord Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.
I hadn’t known Bob was at the concert and his tweet was a lovely pulse of joy that penetrated my exhausted, zombied state.
‘You’ve perked up!” said Susie.
I was happy to see Bob on X, just as many on the Left had performed a Twitterectomy and headed for Bluesky. It felt admirably perverse, in a Bob Dylan kind of way. I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything.
The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent – that holy place where joy resides. I felt proud to have been touring with The Bad Seeds and offering, in the form of a rock ‘n ’roll show, an antidote to this despair, one that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment.
I was elated to think Bob Dylan had been in the audience, and since I doubt I’ll get an opportunity to thank him personally, I’ll thank him here. Thank you, Bob!
“You’ve definitely perked up!” said Susie.
Love, Nick.
PS I appreciate everyone’s patience with The Red Hand Files over the last few months. Finding the time, energy, and concentration on tour to give your questions the answers they deserve has been challenging. But I’m home now, so it will be business as usual. I’m thrilled to be back! Indeed, I’m overjoyed!
Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable.
But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. If you feel crushed by unkindness today, it’s a time for grieving, reaching out to loved ones, noticing one bright color somewhere in the day. Remembering what there is to love. Starting with the immediate, the place and people we can tend ourselves, and make safe. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Because there are so many of us to do it.
And we are all still here today, exactly as we were yesterday. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse. – Barbara Kingsolver
