New Moon Edition January 2026
More than 100 years ago, DaDaists gave us insight into the future of politics as it is being manifest today. When Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal for an exhibition, he was questioning what art really is, by what process art is made, and did it include his ready-mades simply because he repurposed them and called them art. What we call a thing is what we all agree it is until someone tells us persuasively that it now is something else. Such is authority that it can make our reality be whatever serves.
It may surprise you to learn that people pursue power for advantage, and the surest power comes from money. If you’re wealthy, you dwell on an elevated plane of living above the common person. If you’re not wealthy, power comes from courting those who are and doing what they want done to further increase their power. Doing so, you can increase your own and often accumulate a little wealth along the way. It’s a pretty nifty and self-perpetuating arrangement that’s stood the test of time.
Once you have power, you can empower others to do your bidding, whatever it may be. If you are rich enough and powerful enough, who are the rest of us to question your motives. Likely it is to acquire even more wealth and power, which makes perfect sense and who can argue with that? Like an artist toying with aesthetics, you place it where you want and call it what you will because you have the means to repurpose it. On your say so, it’s no longer what we thought it was and now is as you’d have it be.
Can we do more to protect these public servants? It’s a question that needs to be asked, knowing they are under daily assault by completely insane domestic terrorists armed with iPhones and purses. If we’re going to send these representatives of our federal government into the hellhole of urban America, are they at least outfitted with the latest, most fatal weaponry and tactical battle gear? These are combat units, after all, and we owe them that as we send them in harm’s way!
Put yourself in their position for a moment. Look at the photograph above, an actual, vivid, non-photoshopped image captured live at a threatening moment all too familiar in the exercise of their duties. Look at the size of that checkered bag the woman at the right is carrying. Look too at the perilous course of that ominous black vehicle behind her veering ever nearer. And that’s only some of the danger, what we can see in the picture. What else lurks? Ask yourself if you would feel safe crossing that street.
As the saying goes, don’t judge others until you’ve walked a mile in their steel-toed combat boots. Until you have faced down and captured actual undocumented people and others who have violently overstayed their visa. Until you’ve barely been able to bring down a terrorist mother before she drives away from you with a smile on her face. “Fucking bitch” indeed. Because you’re masked, no one sees the private smile on your face as you execute another criminal challenge to federal authority. These are the times that firepower serves you well and giving them that is the least we can do.
Is it true, then, that ICE is the repurposed Proud Boys and battalions of other militia groups who were pardoned en masse from their convictions for the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and a variety of other crimes now to return to the streets far better armed and more uniformly uniformed in the very best tactical gear that says POLICE in large letters across front and back sans skepticism and with a very straight face? They stood down, they stood by, and now they’re standing very tall and fierce.
That may be nothing more than Antifa disinformation, except that Antifa itself is disinformation. It seems to exist only in that form and perhaps the imagination of those who toil and trouble at their cauldrons over such things for purposes unknown. Whatever the truth, it doesn’t take a particularly large leap of the imagination to see the possibilities. We believe in rehabilitation, even of those absolved of their guilt by powers higher than the law, but prefer they be employed unmasked and unarmed.
It would be easy enough in reading over the preceding eight paragraphs to assign it all to a fever dream and assume we’d tomorrow awake from this horrifically absurd display of governance gone berserk to find it was but a nightmare and all in fact is well, the sun shines, birds chirp, butterflies flit, children hopscotch down the walks, and people in their wisdom vote for decency. But if we open our eyes and speak truth to power, we can only say whatever R. Mutt calls it, it’s still a urinal. And we, my fellow Americans of every stripe and color, are being pissed on from above.