Somebody to lean on

Although I am a military historian concentrating on the mass conflicts of the 20^th Century, it’s occurred to me recently that everything I know about resistance movements (specifically those in Nazi-occupied Europe) starts when they were already operational. I don’t know spit about how the various networks were formed; how people who’d had their country invaded, their lives turned upside down and their economies shattered shifted from thinking like law-abiding citizens of a reasonable (ish) government to thinking like clandestine law-breaking rebels who needed to build networks of people they could trust who also had the skills to do the necessary—like print and distribute pamphlets, finance covert operations, amass and use a variety of weapons and all the rest of it.

Resistance cells do not spring fully-formed and armed from the brow of a god, and there was no YouTube back in the 1940s to show you how to plant explosives on the struts of a railroad bridge or set up a radio receiver in your back bedroom. (Or where to find or manufacture the explosives or build a receiver.)

And when you’re living in an authoritarian state, you have to sneak everything you do that could be considered subversive. How do you know that your neighbor Dave is really trustworthy, in the engaging-in-illegal-activities-for-the-good-of-the-country sense of the term? How much are you willing to bet that Dave’s wife won’t inform on you, or get Dave to do it, because she’s terrified that your activities can place her entire family in serious danger? Where can you meet without being seen or overheard, in a region where more than two people having a conversation is suspect? How do you go about forging documents if you’re actually a shopkeeper? Which of your acquaintances have the strength of character and quick-wittedness to push anti-propaganda fliers through mail slots and talk German patrols out of looking in their bicycle basket that’s full of fliers?

And—once you’ve got that cell sorted, how do you connect securely to other groups trying to do the same thing in other villages and towns?

(Interestingly, in the WWII scenario, communists had the advantage in this respect: they already had their cells and networks set up, they had communication capability and they weren’t strangers to organized violence. As long as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was in force, they stood down, but after 22 June 1941, they hit the ground running. The problem was integrating their activities with those of resistance units of other political persuasions, and that’s another issue we face: uniting in a community of noncompliance when there are so many passionate opinions about what should be prioritized.)

The thing about authoritarian regimes is they’re built on terror. The current US administration is no different. For White people, we’re at the intimidation stage. Only this week, the Kleptocrat issued EOs directing his Bimbo General Pam Bondi to “investigate” Chris Krebs, head of CISA during the first term, and Miles Taylor, chief of staff at DHS during same. (The investigations extend to anyone who’s worked with Taylor and Krebs, so—colleagues, companies, possibly even their old fraternity brothers.) Their crimes? Krebs certified that the 2020 election was secure and therefore accurate; Taylor wrote an anonymous NYT op-ed in 2018 criticizing the legality of the policies the president wanted to implement. We are waist-deep in retribution and revenge, and it’s not even three months since inauguration. People who are not White are definitely in the fear and even terror stages. 

Intimidation, fear and terror militate against speaking out, standing out, attracting attention. So the challenge is the same as it was in 1940: building a secure community of trust aligned against the very loud, very bellicose oppressors. Creating a center of mass that counters the mechanisms of structural power and gathering numbers and momentum. It starts, necessarily, one by one.

All that being said, our National Poetry Month entry today is “Lean on Me”, by Bill Withers. Here are Stevie Wonder and John Legend, honoring Withers at his induction into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.

Volume up.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Hold fast

Hope is integral to every resistance movement. You have to believe there’s something better out there, and that it’s achievable, in order to put everything on the line.

That means you have to actively disbelieve the propaganda that’s shat all over you on the daily by the oppressor’s firehose of lies. No, the Kleptocrat is not an economic (or any other) genius; no, heaving a chainsaw and a pack of brochachos at the federal government will not improve anything; no, Canada does not have a gigantic water faucet that we can call on whenever; no, that was not a fucking touristic “day of love” at the Capitol on J6.

Sadly, there are way too many people in this country incapable of doing that even a little.

But for the rest of us, we can start with hope.

And that’s where poets like Langston Hughes can help us. In just a few lines, he’s able to place that small, glowing star in our hands, and open our hearts to the power of dreams, and the devastation that comes when we don’t have them.

“Dreams”

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

I cover all

It seems appropriate that somebody should mark the 160^th Anniversary of the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. I look around me at the media and I see nothing—I mean to say, bupkis—so I guess that somebody is me.

Perhaps the DOGiE brochachos/Proud Boys/Three Percenters crowd are deep in denial about the event. And perhaps that’s because not only did it represent the final loss of the Army of Northern Virginia and a big win by the Army of the Potomac, but because after Lee surrendered, so did every other Confederate general across the country.

It ended the War Between the States, and the Confederacy absolutely, positively, unquestionably lost. And this is something the White Christian nationalist lot really does not like to acknowledge.

Not for nothing are they called the Lost Cause. (Hint: because they lost.)

The pity is that Abraham Lincoln let the 11 Confederate states back into the Union without some kind of thorough de-Nazification process. Well—okay, not his fault, really, him having been assassinated six days after the Appomattox surrender by one of those sore loser Lost Causers. And yes—Congress did pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which does provide for banning insurrectionists from serving in elected federal office, but that doesn’t appear to have stuck; viz: the current occupant of the White House, several Senators and a whole flock of Representatives.

(The Fourteenth also guarantees birthright citizenship, which the insurrectionists are currently riding over in APCs. It appears that it’s one thing to pass laws and an entirely different thing to follow and enforce them. The Constitution these days being more of a guideline or a suggestion than the actual foundation of our civil society.)

So it turns out that that war didn’t actually end 160 years ago, or at least that the ideals of the Confederates—White, male supremacy floating on a completely unsustainable economy--have re-emerged in recent years like zombies. SECDEF Pete Hegseth (who might possibly be able to drink more than Grant, although I'm betting the latter would be able to get up from the table while Petey would be under it) is busy texting war plans to random reporters and renaming military bases after Confederate (losing) generals. They're also rewriting history to blot out things like slavery and anyone non-White who accomplished anything. Ergo silence on this anniversary. So we have to do it all over again, somehow.

In the meantime, for our National Poetry Month entry I’m giving you Twentieth Century American poet Carl Sandburg’s take on the endgame of all wars. Happy 160^th, y’all!

“The Grass”

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?
                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.
                                          Let me work.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Once more you will grant me strength

Women in pretty much every culture live lives of quiet resistance, learning to persevere possibly as early as through their mothers’ milk. No matter where you are, part of the tradition is almost certainly to make women less-than [whatever men are].

So we have learned to resist in small ways as well as large, despite being told over the centuries to shut up and make sandwiches. Poetry, of course, is one way of doing this. Poems are subject to interpretation, and somewhat like ciphers, unless you have the key, you can miss the message.

This is certainly the case with Iranian women poets. They call on the rich heritage of Persian poetry to frame their depiction of life under the ayatollahs, finding brightness where they can, facing darkness with resolution. The weapons of poetry—language, form, words—can strike with the force of a club, or slice like the sharpest Shamshir.

I think that we can draw inspiration from the poets—and especially the female poets—of Iran. They’ve had decades of experience using those weapons to lay bare the corruption and the tyranny of their government. They’ve had to be subtle and clever about it to evade the surveillance state. This is something that we are discovering we need to do in a time when the president of the United States uses the mechanism of government to oppress, suppress and repress anyone who doesn’t plant their lips firmly on his orange arse.

Siminbar Khalili, who wrote under the name Simin Behbahani, was one such. Coming from a progressive and literary family, she produced a body of work that earned her the sobriquet “The Lioness of Iran”. It also earned her nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice, in 1999 and 2002. (The Laureates for those years were, respectively, Günter Grass and Imre Kertész.)

As you might imagine for anyone known as a lioness, Behbahani made authorities uncomfortable. In 2010 at age 82, she was refused permission to leave the country; arrested and detained as she attempted to board a flight to Paris. She was released, but without her passport. If they thought to contain her strength, they were mistaken. She died in 2014, having never been allowed out of Iran, but her poetry remains as a source of strength and hope for us all. Viz.:

“My Country, I Will Build You Again”

My country, I will build you again,
If need be, with bricks made from my life.
I will build columns to support your roof,
If need be, with my bones.
I will inhale again the perfume of flowers
Favored by your youth.
I will wash again the blood off your body
With torrents of my tears.
Once more, the darkness will leave this house.
I will paint my poems blue with the color of our sky.
The resurrector of “old bones” will grant me in his bounty
a mountains splendor in his testing grounds.
Old I may be, but given the chance, I will learn.
I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny.
I will recite the Hadith of love and country
With such fervor as to make each word bear life.
There still burns a fire in my breast
to keep undiminished the warmth of kinship
I feel for my people.
Once more you will grant me strength,
though my poems have settled in blood.
Once more I will build you with my life,
though it be beyond my means.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

So cunning and so cold

I vowed not to look at my 401(k) account for at least the first six months of this year. I knew that it wouldn’t make me feel better, and also that there’s not much I can do about it except ride it out. At the end of last year, I asked my financial adviser whether I’d be okay through 25% tariffs coupled with a 2008-like market drop; he said I would be (and showed me the receipts), so that’s what I’m going with.

(I did, however, go to Wegmans last Tuesday, to use my $15-off-purchase-of-$75-or-more coupon on wine before the tariffs hit. Just in case.)

Even so, when the Kleptocrat announced them before an audience of barking seals on Wednesday, they exceeded all expectations for arbitrariness and idiocy. There’s no doubt in my mind that nations who’ve pissed him off (or just not extolled him to the degree to which he thinks he’s entitled) got higher tariffs, just because he’s president of the United States and he can do it. (Certainly he can as long as Congress rolls over and plays dead; which they are.) Or maybe he does not find their national flag esthetically appealing. Or he has it in mind that they’re a “shithole” country.

We all noticed, for instance, that Russia was not on the list. For the time being, the poodle isn’t going to bite its master.

But it did strike as strange everyone with three synapses firing in sequence that two “nations”—Heard Island and McDonald Islands—got hit with 10% tariffs, despite the fact that they are very small islands off the coast of Antarctica, with no human inhabitants. Yes—Stable Genius is showing penguins (and a few seals) who’s boss around here. He fer dang sure is.

But today is Gratitude Monday, and it’s also National Poetry Month. So my thanks goes to Janel Comeau, whom I follow on Bluesky. On Friday she [ta]riffed on the William Carlos Williams poem, “This Is Just to Say”, with absolute perfection. Viz:

We are talking chef’s kiss here; it was magnificent.

So were other memes.

And then Saturday, all over the US and the world, more than five million people turned out on city streets, in village squares and in front of Tesla dealerships, to tell the greedy bastards to keep their sticky mitts off our rights.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

The nation whose breath is money

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the grand old man of the Beat generation—poet, artist, bookseller and publisher. Although he didn’t consider himself a Beat poet, he certainly captured those times.

Ferlinghetti identified as a philosophical anarchist, and he opposed totalitarianism all his life. In 2006 (in the midst of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the Tea Party and other bad juju), he wrote a response to Khalil Gibran’s “Pity the Nation”. Nineteen years on, with the Tea Baggers having morphed to MAGAts, this poem is even more pertinent than it was when he wrote it.

Listen to it as you read it, let the sharp edges pierce you and the fury and disgust envelop you. That’s what good poetry does.

Let it ignite your own anger and help you focus on actions to change this current reality. That line about letting our rights erode, man... 

“Pity the Nation”
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to  erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
 My country, tears of thee
 Sweet land of liberty!

 

©2025 Bas Bleu