Iran

I was going to make a noose, but instead I made a basket

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The Craftsman

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Feb 16, 2025
 

I was going to make a noose, but instead I made a basket.

The basket coils like a snake in wait, white string binding plain brown rope. It is small but taut. When I rest it on its side, it looks like an eye. I put it on my bedside so it can watch over me as I sleep.

The basket is too small to hold anything but my nightmares. But I know it’s working, because I used up all the rope for my noose.

* * *

I wanted to stab someone 8000 times. Instead, I cross-stitched an ancient design.

The design is a Mediterranean dream not my own. A four-square grid of dark blue and light blue: the cross, the star, the carnation, and the scroll, made of tiny x’s.

 

 

I like imagining that hundreds of years ago, a Byzantine craftsman stitched the same patterns as me. I do Palestinian embroidery, tatreez, for similar reasons. I want to learn from a past that persists to the present: a strike against genocidaires who insist that Palestinian culture never existed.

I also do tatreez because it’s attractive. Why is it so hard for some to see the beauty? Maybe this is not a question to ask of those who abide the mass murder of children. People who violate universal taboos are not going to understand art or life or love.

It takes me about a month to stab something 8000 times. To X out so much that my stabbing forms intricate shapes and the X’s blend into a restorative whole. From a distance, there is no X in the fabric at all.

I stabbed X so many times that a new and tranquil world took its place.

As I embroidered, Santorini — where I spent my honeymoon decades ago; Santorini, where the inspiration for this textile came — was evacuated due to earthquakes. I remembered riding a donkey by ancient ruins and eating octopus fresh from the sea, and my husband and I wondering when the Iraq War, then three months old, would end. By the time the war of lies was over, we were raising two children in a rotting husk of America, and Greece hated us with reason.

I dream of Mediterranean days. The soft blue thread makes me feel like I could still ride the waves, though I likely never will again.

I wove a cloth of rage, and when it was finished, I held a cloth of memory.

* * *

I wanted to beat someone to death, but instead I got a treadle loom. A loom is an ideal apparatus if you feel like murdering people but also making an appealing placemat.

The center part of a loom is called a beater. You slam it until you push the threads into submission. Before you beat the threads, you pull them through narrow metal slots, like prison bars for string, until they reach the other side. That thread is called “warp” because it takes a warped mind to create this contraption.

I am learning to weave from an 81-year-old woman who generously gave me her old loom and is teaching me how to use it. I asked her how to get the threads through the slots, and she informed me I would use a “slay hook.”

“Yes!” I said, wielding the s-shaped metal like a weapon until she gently told me it was spelled “sley hook”.

“I’m calling it a slay hook anyway,” I said. “Because I want to slay something.”

“Well, this part of the process is very boring,” she said, as I moved 120 strands of thread one by one, “so you might as well.”

I wondered what the spies using surveillance technology to track me thought of my new project. I hoped they were stuck watching my weaving lesson. I hope they groaned when they discovered that after pulling each thread through 120 tiny bars, I had to pull each thread through 120 tiny holes. I hope I bored them to death.

Excessive crafting is a standard Midwestern response to excessive stress. I would be a model Midwestern housewife if I didn’t despise these people with every fiber of my being, and some fibers beyond it.

 

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The men who would strip the future for parts

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The Miners

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Feb 8, 2025
 

There were coyote tracks at the Missouri mine. They weren’t supposed to be there. No one understood how such a distant predator got in or how to keep it out. But that’s true about a lot of places in America these days.

We were wandering the ruins of Federal Mill Number Three, the largest lead mine in the US until its closure in 1972. For centuries, most lead came from Missouri. Ammunition for every war, toxic paint for every child’s classroom, noxious petrol for every parent’s car.

Lead spread from the heartland, made in America, and when we were poisoned, we were poisoned together.

Lead exposure makes you violent. It possibly created generations of psychopaths. But folks didn’t know that when Federal Mill opened in 1906. They knew the ground sparkled when they walked. They thought the earth was meant to be stripped down and sold for parts, because its bounty was infinite, and the country was new.

But lead was finite, like freedom. The mine closed after the minerals were extracted and the ground was useless and torn. A chart from the last day of operation stands in front of rusted towers, workers’ names frozen in the hour their world ended.

Missouri did what it always does in the face of self-made disaster: it turned the mine into a park. Federal Mill became the Missouri Mines State Historic Site. It has two museums and an ORV track nearby, where the ground is too toxic for straight hiking but still ripe for fun.

I’ve had a lot of good times in abandoned Missouri mines. I kayaked through one using a Hefty bag as a sea blanket and took a pontoon ride past a scuba diving pit in another. Missouri excels at turning wreckage into recreation. Our state has been living in the aftermath of the American Dream for a long, long time.

We are an Aftermath State of Aftermath People.

I had passed the ruins of Federal Mill Number Three from the highway for twenty years. But I’d never gone inside, and it seemed like time.

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The Confluence

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I’ve been right so long, I’ve been done wrong.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Jan 29, 2025
 

I woke up to a note I had no memory of writing. I scrawled it in the dead of night, a time I used to dread but now embrace, because the nightmare-makers sleep then too.

It is January 2025. The future has caught up with my prognostications and I’ve started rationing reality: as Shirley Jackson noted, too much of it makes you insane. But I’ve written the story of American autocracy so many damn times that I can’t watch it play out at the speed of life. My mind works like a rigged redactor, drawing black lines over the sins of day.

Later my conscience gets the better of me and I remember what I long to forget. I write it down because those redacted lines stretch like a highway to the past. The past is precious: that’s why oligarchs want to erase it. The past is a gift, but living in it was a curse. I walked that highway like a time-traveling hitchhiker, thumb forever down.

Folks like to say that no one believed my warnings. I wish that were the case. The hard truth is officials believed them and let the worst happen anyway.

The first article calling me Cassandra came out in 2016. “A Cassandra of Trumpland”, it proclaimed, due to my observation that Americans were a betrayed people and my prediction that Trump would win and rule like a kleptocrat. In 2019, I got upgraded to “The Prophet of Flyover Country” for claiming US institutions were too corrupt to combat autocracy and the Mueller probe would do nothing to stop Trump’s takeover.

My predictions were obvious, the monikers ridiculous. I accept only one nickname: Cosa Nostradamus, because all I see coming is transnational organized crime.

Track the profit, not the prophet. America’s fortune’s been told and it’s sitting in offshore accounts.

* * *

I open the note to see what I wrote to myself.

“I Been Right So Long, I Been Done Wrong,” it said at the top. Underneath, I wrote: “(Kendzior Blues)” followed by paragraphs of lyrics.

I started laughing. Who was directing my subconscious? Lightnin’ Hopkins? Tony Joe White? I could hear the melody as I read: I woke with a song in my head that I hadn’t known I composed. I hoped I hadn’t sung it while sleeping, for the sake of my household. But I decided it was okay if I had.

David Lynch had died the week before. I was mourning him along with everything else American. Twin Peaks is my comfort show. Its world reflects our Epstein reality — with the exception of its competent, imaginative FBI agent. I rewatch Twin Peaks because in the pilot, everyone is crying — the way you should cry when someone dies. Lynch’s work is surreal but never fake, in contrast to AI and its heartless facsimiles.

In 1992, Lynch was panned for telling the truth too early with the Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk with Me, and its raw exploration of female pain and exploitation. His film came out three months before Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope and was also punished for telling the truth too early — again, about power and sexual abuse. I watched their vindications over the decades, artistic and factual. I know they both would have traded vindication for justice, and that’s why I loved them.

Now they’re both dead, and the industries that never understood them are dying, and Americans are being sold scraped bits of plagiarized humanity in their place. AI will never tell the truth too early: that’s why authoritarians crave it. AI knocks out the inherently human power of subconscious pattern recognition. AI will never challenge authority. AI will never dream.

If you learn anything from David Lynch, it’s that dreams matter. Even if they’re wild. Even if they leave notes in the night that go a lil’ summin’ like this:

I been right so long, I been done wrong
Lost the fight and all I got left is this song
Singing a chorus but no one here to sing along
A solo to a choir of liars in the midday sun
Ten years of warning, in the end — it’s ten years gone.

I did the only thing a Missourian can do when they start writing the blues in their sleep: I went to the river.

* * *

The Confluence is one of my favorite places to go in winter. This is the spot where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers meet. In warm weather, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. But when the rivers freeze, the Mississippi thaws first, turning a shimmering blue, while the Missouri stays a dull translucent grey with shards of swift-moving ice.

This January saw the longest stretch of freezing weather in St. Louis in decades, contributing to the stir-crazy feeling that made me pen the nighttime autocracy blues, but promising adventure once the cold receded. It was frigid on the day I arrived, but earlier warmth had melted the snow, making the trail passable. The wind whipped my skin as I approached the water, but I was so glad to be outside that I didn’t care.

At the Confluence, fading signs remind you that you are at the nexus of history. This is where two major American rivers collide, where Lewis and Clark set out on their westward journey. They left behind the Mississippi, that mighty river of pain.

When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America — a change I acknowledge as much as the so-called renaming of Twitter — my first thought was how many songs he would ruin. And that music would be the reason the name would never stick, because the real America — the one Trump keeps approximating but never lands — is the America of country and rock and blues, of Memphis and New Orleans, of a river of mud that empties into a swampland gulf.

Trump is good at reading America the way a vulture is good at detecting prey. But he can never feel soul, and soul is what the river has to offer. Soul is safe at the river, even when your own soul hurts like hell.

On the way to the Confluence, I checked my email. “Despair is not an option!” an email heading proclaimed, which I thought was rude — folks need to know they have options! The emailer’s recommended remedy was to send politicians money.

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Georgia On My Mind

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By Dai Bando

In 1976, The Band recorded “Georgia On My Mind” to benefit Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. Mr. Carter was then governor of Georgia. “We released a single of ‘Georgia’ in Mr. Carter’s honor,” remembered Levon Helm, “Richard (Manuel) sang it with the ‘soul factor’ turned pretty high. We played ‘Georgia’ on Saturday Night Live, and a few days later Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States.”

So, there you have it: Richard Manuel turned his soul factor to ‘high’ and Georgia’s Jimmy Carter was elected President. It’s science.

I saw The Band perform (with all but Robbie) with my pal Tony in Boston in 1983. I don’t remember Richard singing “Georgia,” that night, but he did sing another Ray Charles classic “You Don’t Know Me.” I’ll never forget Richard singing that song. “Afraid and shy, I let my chance go by…” I remember thinking, “me too, Richard.” (It was 1983 and I was finally getting my shit together. You don’t know me, indeed.)


Jimmy Carter became friends with not only with The Band, but also with Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson (“he’s my buddy,” said President Carter), and the Allman Brothers Band, who were the Kings of Southern Rock at the time.

In the fall of 1975, the Allmans played a fundraiser show for Carter’s campaign right here at the Providence Civic Center. I wasn’t there (Pu Pu platters needed to be bussed at The Great House that night) but my friend MV attended the show. MV later told me he missed Jimmy Carter appearing onstage because he was busy puking in a Civic Center bathroom due to drinking too much ‘Southern Comfort’ How’s that for 100 proof irony? [listen to that complete live show here, via the Internet Archive]


Jimmy Carter was the first “rock and Roll” president. He wore blue jeans and frequently quoted Bob Dylan. Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin, performed at his inauguration. Remember when “The Piano Guys” performed at Trump’s last inauguration? Me neither.

Carter’s achievements include the historic Camp David Peace Accord between Egypt and Israel. He created the Department of Education, bolstered the Social Security system, and appointed record numbers of women, blacks, and Hispanics to Government jobs. He was most proud of never having led his country into a war. “We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet.”


He certainly had his failures; gasoline lines, historic unemployment and generally the worst economy of my lifetime. Mainly though, Carter had the misfortune of being president when Iran took American 70 hostages on November 4, 1979.

The hostage crisis ended with the hostages being released the day Carter left office and was replaced by Ronald Reagan. Before the presidential transition, Reagan’s campaign manager and future CIA director William Casey made a secret trip to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini’s posse to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election, preventing an “October Surprise” that could have resulted in Carter’s reelection. This ‘conspiracy theory’ was later confirmed by Abolhassan Banisadr, the former President of Iran. Reagan kept the hostages in their cells for a few extra months to ensure an election victory. As President George W. Bush would declare years later, “Mission accomplished!”

Of course, most Americans were elated that Reagan won the election regardless of any dirty tricks with the hostages. Reagan ended the Soviet Union (“Mr Gorbacev, tear down this wall”) and got the U.S. economy purring once again with deregulation. Deregulation works every time, until some deregulated train derails and spews cancer-causing fumes for a hundred miles.

Reagan illegally sold weapons and trained Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Mujahideen, whom he called “freedom fighters.” So, there’s that minor mistake in judgment. I can hear a Fox News talking head right now, “Sure Reagan trained Osama bin Laden, but at least he didn’t train Dr. Anthony Fauci!”


Reagan communicated simple ideas: “Government is bad. Our enemies are evil.” Carter was far more complex and often said the things we didn’t want to hear. He was the first president to warn about the dangers of oil dependence and climate change.

I agree with the NY Times editorial that read “Jimmy Carter was probably the most intelligent, hard-working and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century.”


Rest In peaceful dreams, President Jimmy Carter. Hoping the road leads back to you.

Jimmy Carter with his “buddy” Willie Nelson