Roaming Charges: History Hurts – CounterPunch.org

“History is what hurts.”

– Frederic Jameson

It was 92 in the shade and we fled to the nearest theater to escape the heat and the shrouds of smoke from distant fires that had drifted across the Cascades into the Valley. The movie was “The Odyssey.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, not Homer’s, which quickly became apparent. The screen was 28 meters wide, roughly the width, by the way, of the theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens, where many plays depicting episodes from the Trojan War and the homecoming were performed. The cost of the ticket was $35, much cheaper than the $1,000 some New Yorkers have shelled out for the chance to watch the three-hour epic on 70mm IMAX screens, through the latest innovation of late-capitalism, dynamic pricing. (Thank you, Bruce Springsteen.) In 4th-century Athens, the city-state comped entry fees for the 25,000 people who would assemble to watch the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Maybe Mamdani will provide a city subsidy for at least a bag of popcorn, which now costs more than a movie ticket did a decade ago, when there was still a film industry in the US.

The less said about Nolan’s film, the better. Frankly, there’s not much to critique. It is what it is, a spectacle in search of a reason to exist, like Cleopatra or Ben Hur or Gone With the Wind. It’s not history. It’s not literature. It’s an entertainment. It’s, in the words of a pretty astute cultural critic: “a joke.” 173 minutes summed up in two words. Top that, Pauline Kael. It is a joke, but alas, not a funny one. Christopher Nolan has no sense of humor. Neither did his hero Stanley Kubrick, but Kubrick at least had the smarts to hire screenwriters like Terry Southern, who did, and actors like Peter Sellers, who could inject a jolt of life into an otherwise dreary exercise in literature-to-big-screen hokum like Lolita.

The funniest thing Nolan did was to cast Matt Damon as Odysseus, the great prankster of Greek literature and not give him one funny line, not even a pun. Nolan has populated his films with recognizable faces, an all-star lineup of Hollywood celebrities. Some of them are fine actors. But not in this film. None of the actors act. They pose and speak, stilted words, arthritic phrases. (In a revealing casting choice, Menelaus, Helen’s cuckolded and abusive husband who scars her face to despoil her legendary beauty, was played by John Bernthal, an outspoken defender of Israel’s genocidal rampages in Gaza, who invited ex-Israeli special forces soldiers onto his Call to Arms and praised their “wet-work”.)

Nolan doesn’t need actors. There’s little room for acting here. Nolan said that because he insists on shooting with 70 mm IMAX cameras, he can only film for three minutes at a time.   The demands of character development and emotional depth must be sacrificed to the demands of action. How can Odysseus have the time to think about what he has done or what he will do, when a jump cut must be made every couple of minutes to a new scene of peril? In fact, Nolan doesn’t even need much of a script. It’s all about the images, even when the montage of images is inchoate. The classics scholar Emily Wilson, whose vivid and energetic new translation of The Odyssey Nolan claimed to have consulted for his film, scorched the film, saying she would have been “ashamed to have written any part” of the screenplay.

The heresy, if that’s what you want to call it, in casting Zendaya as Athena and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra) isn’t that they are black actors but that the allegedly “woke” Christopher Nolan gave these black actors so little to do. Like Helen, Nyont’o is one of the world’s most beautiful humans, a rarefied model of the perfection of the species. And that captivating allure shines through her scar-riven face. Nolan gives her a handful of lines, merely to advance the plot. But how does Helen feel about being dragged back to Sparta, bound as a sex-slave and war trophy to the dull-witted man who shredded her face and killed her lover? We’re left in the dark.

Athena may well have been black (see: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization). As one of the supreme Olympian deities, she was certainly capable of assuming whatever form or skin color she desired and Zendaya may well be the closest living human to a goddess on Earth. But Nolan has her do little more than console Odysseus, while wrapped in a drab woven cloak, looking like Mary Magdalene, patting Jesus on the back. But this is Athena, the great intellect and warrior goddess, who, consumed by petty jealousy (See: the Judgement of Paris), plotted and enabled the sacking of Troy and the genocide of the Trojans and provided a shield of LAPD-like impunity for her favorite killer. We’d like to hear her explain herself.

I’m a little dismayed at MAGA’s hostility toward Nolan. After all, he shares their rosy nostalgia for a past that never existed. He wants to Make Cinema Grand Again in the tradition of Griffith, DeMille, and Ford. Big pictures with big budgets made only on film (despite its environmental consequences) projected onto big screens in big movie palaces. Big, big, big. All of it backed by bankers, private equity, insurers and reinsurers. Nolan’s megalomania is almost Trumpian. But surely the future of movie-making, if it has a future, is elsewhere. At the end of his life, Jean-Luc Godard was making movies shot on his iPhone and found it liberating. The two breakout films of the summer, Obsession and Backrooms, were made by former YouTubers. Why go back? Why chain yourself to the demands of the money men and cinema owners?

A genocide has taken place. A city has been burnt to the ground by an invading force. All of its men have been killed, even the boys. Its women have been raped. Some of them have been taken back in cages as property of the killers. A man is adrift on a makeshift raft in the Mediterranean, fleeing the war zone, a refuge of sorts, looking for a homeland. Who is this man? Where is he going? What does he want?

He’s a killer. He’s a conman. He is a liar, a thief, a plunderer. He’s a rapist, an adulterer, a child killer, and a blasphemer. He’s committed genocide. He’s a head case. He’s haunted by the past. Wracked by the things he’s done and the travails he’s endured trying to get home, if home is really where he wants to get. He’s the earliest case of PTSD in literature. He’s Odysseus!

These are the elements of a story that speaks across the ages to our own moment of genocide, plunder, tyranny, exile and refugees. But Nolan’s film doesn’t. In fact, it’s hard to say what Nolan’s film does and why he wanted to make a film called The Odyssey and not, say, another space opera. He gets so much wrong about the poem that you wonder why he was attracted to the story in the first place. It’s the ultimate act of hubris to rewrite Homer, which is fine, if you’ve got the chops. James Joyce did it, but Nolan is not Joyce, even in his own limited medium of film. He’s not even the Cohen Brothers.

Nolan says he was only able to make the Odyssey because of the huge box office returns from his previous film, Oppenheimer. And in a sense, the Odyssey is the perfect sequel to Oppenheimer.

The Odyssey is a sequel, in many ways, to Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, a heroic treatment of the man who designed the atom bomb. Here is the story of genocider, turned into a hero, because of his ceaseless determination to find his way home. But how ceaseless was Odysseus’s desire for home, really?

What happens after the bomb goes off? What happens after the mass killing?  Odysseus gets lost. He gets lost in his own mind. Is he consumed by guilt or his own hubris? Hubris was a big thing for the Greeks. All their heroes seemed to have it and nearly all were undone by it. It was hubris that led Odysseus to set an uncharted course home to Ithaka. It was hubris that prompted him to shoot a parting arrow at Polyphemus, enraging his father Poseidon.  It was hubris that sent him to the land of the Lotus Eaters. It was hubris that made him raid the Cicones, destroy their city, commit genocidal slaughter again, steal and rape the women. It was hubris that made him open the bag of winds. Hubris that made him try to loot the land of the Laestrygonians (who appear briefly in Nolan’s film in shiny armor like giant versions of the Arthurian knights in Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac), with fatal consequences for his crew. And on and on.

In his much too brief life, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 44 films, including some of the best in the history of cinema. The combined cost of all those films was less than the cost of Christopher Nolan’s $250 million production of The Odyssey. In fact, you could add the cost of all 40 of Jean Renoir’s films to Fassbinder’s and still have enough left over for Agnès Varda to have made a film or two. Varda could have made a film of the Odyssey for a few dollars, relatively speaking, which would have mined the misogyny of the Greek heroes, including the main man, and celebrated the retribution of the women they’ve abused and betrayed. Because Nolan portrays Odysseus as a hero, longing to return home to his wife, the faithful Penelope, he elides Odysseus’s great sin, an act as dark and depraved as anything an ISIS fighter or US GI at My Lai did. He’s slaughtered the innocent. He’s tricked them into sacrificial deaths.

In Hades, Agamemnon rises from the grave to tell Odysseus the story of his own homecoming, bearing Cassandra, the soothsaying princess of Troy, back with him to Mycenae in a cage as booty, only to be slaughtered in his own bed by his wife, Clytemnestra. The maniacal king warns Odysseus that he might face a similar fate in Ithaka. Odysseus has reason for concern, for reasons Nolan doesn’t explore. His wife Penelope is Clytemnestra’s cousin and she’s likely to have learned of his own role in the vile killing of Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia. As the Greek fleet assembled in the port town of Aulis, Agamemnon decided to go hunting in Artemis’s sacred grove, where he killed a deer, enraging the goddess, who loved animals more than men. Artemis calmed the winds and Agamemnon’s invasion force was stuck in port until, warns the priest Calchas, the king sacrifices his own child. Odysseus comes up with the plan. He persuades Clytemnestra and Iphigenia that the young girl will be wed to the great warrior Achilles and escorts her back to Aulis and places her on the sacrificial rock where her father slits her throat.  It would be easier to rehabilitate Harvey Weinstein than Odysseus.

Penelope must know this. She was Clytemnestra’s cousin. She had lived in Mycenae. She was Iphegenia’s aunt. Odysseus had every reason to delay coming home to her. After all, Penelope, the siren calling from Ithaka, means a kind of predatory seabird, a kingfisher, a fisher for kings. And like Iphigenia, Penelope was once sacrificed by her own parents, who had cast her off the cliff into the sea, only to see her saved by the very birds for whom she was named.

What does Penelope think? How does she really feel about the man who left her and took his time coming home, philandering and killing across the Mediterranean? We don’t know. Nolan doesn’t tell us. He doesn’t understand women. They’ve always been one-dimensional characters in his films. But she wasn’t for the Greeks. There’s an ambiguity to Penelope, a mystique, if you will, that makes you ask, how much she’s really yearning for her lost husband. After all, she isn’t weaving a shroud to honor Odysseus, but his aged father, Laertes, who stayed home, faithful to her, her son and Ithaka.

Penelope was exalted in early Christian theology for her fidelity. But you can’t say the same for our hero. While he may have been mesmerized by Calypso, he spent a year canoodling with Circe of his own volition. He wasn’t all that eager to get back to Penelope’s bedchamber. But Nolan elides this telling detail from his film.

Only the brooding nymph Calypso succeeds in slowing Odysseus down. The wanderer stays seven years on Ogygia. But there’s little time for contemplation in Nolan’s slaughter fest. The seven years in Calypso’s thrall are squeezed into seven minutes of film and Calypso is reduced to the role of Odysseus’ therapist, feeding him lotus flowers like Prozac. Is Calypso a Freudian or Jungian? We don’t know. We don’t even learn what’s really bugging him or how he exorcizes his demons enough to apologize to Poseidon, the earth-shaker, and ride the current back to Ithaka. What did he learn? To honor the dead, maybe. But he would continue to make many more of them.

But this is not Calypso’s role in the Odyssey. She is another avenging proto-feminist, who tricks the trickster Odysseus and keeps him captive for seven years, taking her pleasure with him, doing to Odysseus what Odysseus would have done to her and had done to the Trojan women.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus doesn’t unload his story to Calypso, but to King Alcinous of the Phaiacians and his enchanting daughter Nausicca on the island of Scheria (Corfu), a city-state which treated sea-borne immigrants like Odysseus with kindness and hospitality, a running theme of Homer’s poem, which Nolan manages to mangle.

There are unanswered questions, left hanging, because of the box office. What are the sirens singing, “each to each,” Eliot put it. Are they singing songs of seduction, tempting him into the fatal waters? Or are they singing songs of horror, threnodies for the needless death, tempting him to drown himself in shame? Nolan doesn’t even hint at the answer, for there’s another thrilling episode just a few scenes away. This is high-T film-making, cinematics for the manosphere. It’s gotta move, baby. The warrior ethic ain’t got time for introspection.

We see them only at a distance, women lounging on rocks. For the Greeks, the sirens had the bodies of birds. They sang songs of death. They were made by the Goddess Demeter to search the Underworld for her daughter Persephone, who’d been taken into the eternal darkness by Hades to be his bride. Were they taunting Odysseus with shades of the men and women he sent there?

The historian Mary Beard ridiculed Nolan’s film for its lack of sex, which, as Freud made clear, is the driving force behind almost all Greek drama and comedy. But Nolan has no feel for human sexuality. Does divine Eros make even one fleeting appearance to alter the course of any film in Nolan’s brutalist oeuvre? No. He’s only comfortable in the horrorshow realm of Thanatos. Nolan makes movies that appeal to bros with college degrees, usually in finance.

The most generous thing that can be said about Nolan’s film is that it’s a movie about a man who has committed genocide and who is so mentally unbalanced by the experience that he kills and plunders all the way home, making one bad decision after another, until every member of his own army has joined the ranks of the dead. Then he finally arrives home, where he cleanses his bad conscience–to the extent he has a conscience–by killing nearly every man left in Ithaka, especially savoring the murder of a draft-dodging suitor of Penelope, someone who didn’t want to go slaughter Trojans to open the trade routes for the tyrannical Agamemnon. This final act of mass violence instructs his previously non-violent son Telemachus how to kill too, so that he can become king and the killing can go generation after generation. Nolan tacks on an ending that’s more Lord of the Rings than the Odyssey, as Penelope and Nolan’s now sanctified-through-more-blood hero Odysseus set sail for the West to honor the dead, but only the Greeks, not the Trojans whose entire population Odysseus and Agamemnon have wiped out.

In Homer’s poem, a truer ending takes place. The mass slaughter at the palace is greeted with rage by the populace, who gather to storm the gates, until Athena, once again, intervenes to save her own private mercenary, Odysseus. He just can’t stop killing. If Homer had enjoyed Cassandra’s gift (or curse) of prophecy, he too might have had Odysseus setting sail into the West to spread the genocidal method to the nascent empire across the sea.

The greatest cinematic version of The Odyssey is a film about the absurdity of making a film about The Odyssey, Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt), where Michel Piccoli’s character is hired by an American producer (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script for a film of the Odyssey being shot on Capri by Fritz Lang. Piccoli brings his wife with him to Italy, herself a living goddess, Bridget Bardot, whose ravishing beauty and erotic allure overshadow all of the characters in Lang’s film. Ultimately, Bardot, unlike Penelope, wastes little time leaving her husband, who is lost in the endless rewrites of the script, and runs off with the American moneyman to their own rendezvous with tragedy.

Godard’s movie was made for $1 million, double the amount of any of his previous films. Half of the budget went to Bardot’s fee. Even so, the images of the film within a film, shot by arguably the greatest cinematographer in the history of film, Raoul Coutard, are more evocative and visually entrancing than scenes in Nolan’s made-for-IMAX production. (IMAXxing is the looksmaxxing of the film industry.) Le Mépris can almost be seen as a prescient parody of Nolan’s–with better acting, editing and cinematography.

Neither Robert Oppenheimer nor Odysseus faced any sanctions, legal or divine, for their war crimes, except, I guess, for how bad the movies that celebrated them as flawed heroes turned out to be.

If you’re thinking about going to see the Odyssey, I’d recommend renting Pasolini’s Medea and Oedipus Rex instead, films made by a poet who understood the contemporary resonances of the poetic myths he was reenacting.

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+ Donald Trump, the FIFA Peace Prize winner, will have bombed 8 countries in 1.5 years and 12 in his 5.5 years: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Mali…with Colombia, Cuba and Mexico on the will-call list.

+ You’d be hard-pressed to identify whether this statement by a US congressman was about the Iran war, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, the Korean War or the Spanish-American War. But it was actually written in 1845 about the Mexican-American War, a war of conquest to create the new-slaveholding state of Texas…”It is to be doubted whether any man, save the President and his Cabinet, knows the real and secret designs that provoked [the war]. To suppress inquiry, and silence all opposition to conduct so monstrous, an executive ukase [tyrannical edict] has been sent forth, strongly intimating, if not clearly threatening, the charge of treason, against all who may dare to call in question the wisdom or propriety of his measures.” – Rep. Alexander Stephens, 1845, who later became Jefferson Davis’s Vice President of the Confederacy. They may have been slavers, but Stephens and John C. Calhoun (the Yale grad, who became Melville’s model for Ahab in Moby Dick) were also early anti-imperialists.

+ An assessment by US intelligence agencies concluded that Trump’s last round of airstrikes on Iran did little significant or long-term damage to Iran and are unlikely to soften the regime’s position in future negotiations.

+ A nameless Pentagon staffer told the Washington Post that “We do not have enough [weapons] to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.”….For years, the US military has operated under the “two-war” doctrine, meaning that the US military should be funded and equipped to fight two major regional wars at the same time. It turns out that under Trump and Hegseth the US can’t even fight a relatively minor war, involving no ground trumps, versus a much smaller, ill-equipped nation, for 5 months without emptying its arsenal of weapons and running out of money, even though its budget of $1 Trillion is almost three times the size of its closet rival, China ($336 billion) and five times the size of Russia’s ($190 billion). And it’s losing the war!

+ The NYT reported that US intelligence agencies believe that Iran’s new leaders are more open to pursuing nuclear weapons after being bombed by Israel and the US. And well they should be, given that only countries without nuclear weapons get bombed by the US. But this is likely bullshit to justify ongoing airstrikes in the name of preventing Iran from pursuing a weapon it doesn’t want.

+ According to a report in the Telegraph, while the US struggles to restock its weapons arsenal, China is sending rocket launchers to Iran.

+ Iran can replenish its drone supply in a matter of days. It takes the US years to restock its “high-tech” missiles. Russian and Chinese military strategists must be eating these reports of the US military’s premature missile ejaculations, leaving behind a spent force after a mere five months of bombing largely defenseless targets…

+ A Wall Street Journal piece detailed how quickly Iran has rebuilt infrastructure damaged by US and Israeli airstrikes, with repairs being made to missile bases outside the cities of Kangavar, Dezful and Kermanshah, a bombed bridge reconstructed within a week, and major fixes made at a Revolutionary Guard shipyard on the Caspian Sea.

+ Trump and Hegseth have launched at least 67 airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 221 people, without any proof they are drug traffickers and, as the Washington Post reported, no evidence that the illegal killings have slowed the flow of drugs, especially cocaine, into the US. Legalize it, don’t lethalize it…

+ The Trump administration, backed by credulous reporting by the New York Times, claimed there is a Russian spy base in Cuba. But reporter Reed Lindsay found the alleged espionage center to be only a Cuban school, which, of course, will probably make it a priority target if Trump launches airstrikes.

+ Apparently, Iran must be bombed to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon it doesn’t want, while the country that sent 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 and later murdered a Washington Post journalist inside a consulate in Turkey and used bone saws to quarter his body is perfectly welcome to one…

+ You’d need the mind of Roland Barthes (or Mel Brooks) to fully deconstruct all of the elements at work in this image…

+ Since the Trump-blessed “ceasefire” in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 1,209 Palestinians (including two children this week) in Gaza and wounded 3,943.

+ House Democrats who opposed cutting aid to Israel had pocketed three times as much money from pro-Israel donors…

+ Here’s how Google AI describes the polls showing U.S. attitudes toward Israel eroding sharply since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023. A spring 2026 Pew survey found 60% of adults view Israel unfavorably, up from 42% in 2022, while Gallup data shows sympathies for Israelis and Palestinians nearly even at 36% and 41%. The shift is strongest among younger Americans and Democrats, with 80% of Democrats unfavorable, though Republicans remain supportive at 78% approval for Israel’s Gaza actions. This generational and partisan divide raises questions about future U.S. policy as the conflict nears three years.”  What AI program are the Democrats using that makes them think otherwise?

+ Israeli President Isaac Herzog claims he’s a descendant of 10th-century BCE King David, even though there’s no more contemporaneous historical or archaeological evidence such a person existed than there is for Odysseus…

+ I was scanning baseball scores this morning to check on the sinking fortunes of the Mariners and first read this headline as “There’s a Unanimous Number 1 in the Hitler Power Rankings.” After correcting my dyslexic reading, it struck me that what CounterPunch needs is a weekly Hitler Power Rankings for the Global Rulers of our time.

Hitler Power Rankings
WCAR (War Crimes Above Replacement)

Benjamin Netanyahu (WCAR 7.2)
Donald Trump (WCAR 6.8)
Vladimir Putin (WCAR 6.1)
Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (WCAR 6.0)
Kim Jong Un (WCAR 5.9)
Nayib Bukele (WCAR 5.2)
Narendra Modi (WCAR 5.0)
Recep Tayyip Erdogan (WCAR 4.8)
Daniel Noboa (WCRA 4.2)
Serdar Berdimuhamedow (WCAR 3.9)

+ Turkmenistan’s Berdimuhamedow edged his way into the top ten after Lola discovered that his sycophants had feted him as the “Meritorious Dog Breeder of Turkmenistan,” an honor, Lola reports, that the dogs of Turkmenistan rowdily dispute.

+ Americans overwhelmingly think the Iran war is wrong and want it to be brought to an end immediately. But they don’t trust the Democrats to do it. Rightly so, given the fact that the Democrats can’t be trusted to do anything they say they’ll do and in this case they were quick to attack Trump for trying, feebly as is his way, to end it weeks ago….

Reporter: Is America backing away from a larger military attack because our stockpile has been depleted?

Mike Waltz, UN Ambassador: We have to take a step back here. A lot of our stockpiles were depleted because of Biden.

Reporter: But you acknowledge they’re depleted?

Waltz: No. [He just said they were.] And the people leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.

+ New Economist poll: 49% of Americans believe the U.S. should arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, while only 27% are opposed…Yet, even Mamdani won’t do it, claiming he doesn’t have the authority. If Mamdani was serious, and not just play-acting, he’d enforce the warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest and let the courts decide if he had the authority to do so.

Favor / Oppose

Total: 49-27
Black: 53-13
Hispanic: 52-15
Ages 18-29: 58-17
Harris voters: 74-10
Independents: 55-20

+ House Democrats who opposed cutting aid to Israel had pocketed three times as much money from pro-Israel donors…

+ Trump and Hegseth have launched at least 67 airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 221 people, without any proof they are drug traffickers and, as the Washington Post reported, no evidence that the illegal killings have slowed the flow of drugs, especially cocaine, into the US. Legalize it, don’t lethalize it…

+ How Trump Learned Geography: “I owned the Miss Universe pageant. And Miss Venezuela always did very well in that pageant. So I know something about the country.”

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+ The richest 34 Americans (i.e., the top 0.00001%) now control roughly $2.6 trillion in wealth–a record 12% of all U.S. national income.

+ CNN: 73% of US adults say that President Donald Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems like affordability. Meanwhile, Trump’s disapproval rating has topped 60% for the first time at the poll aggregator site, 50plusone.

+ Trump’s old pal Bill O’Reilly says the president “needs a breather,” and should take August off because of his old age. Perhaps Trump can spend the month raking and grooming a forest somewhere in the American West.

+ It is Trump’s fate to be hated by the people he always wanted to love him and loved by people he despises. Beyond what it says about America, there’s a kind of karma there, for Trump anyway.

+ Using what he called “conservative math,” the New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick estimates the Trump family has made close to $4 billion “off of the presidency” in about a year–meaning that in his second term as President Trump has banked (one hesitates to call it “earned”) more money than in the previous 60 years of his life.

+ Bloomberg News reports that those white-collar professionals who looked to Miami as a refuge for a lower-tax, cheaper way of life are now finding that it’s more expensive than New York City (and much more boring).

+ According to the National Association of Realtors, the annual income needed to qualify for a mortgage has risen relentlessly through the course of the year…

January: $93,552
February: $93,792
March: $97,824
April: $101,424
May: $106,128
June: $109,152

+ Is there a single metric that doesn’t show the American Empire in a state of rapid decline? According to Axios, “the new measure, calculated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, finds that only about 53% of American adults own their own homes — not the commonly cited homeownership rate of 65% calculated by the Census Bureau. For adults under age 35, it’s bleaker: Only 22% are homeowners under the new measure, compared with 37% under the traditional one.”

+ About those golden years in Trump’s “golden age,” 69% of Americans have said rising costs have put retirement out of reach for their generation. CNBC. Most Americans estimate that they will need $1.2 million comfortable, but ore than half of those who 51% of Americans who participate in a workplace retirement plan expect to have less than $500,000 set aside when they reach retirement age.

+ Speaking of the Golden Age…There have been few humans with a sharper mind than the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, but even he had little patience for the manufactured obtuseness of his friend Jacques Lacan’s prose, writing: “I always had the impression that, to his fervent admirers, the word ‘understand’ meant something different from what it meant to me. I’d have to read everything five or six times. Merleau-Ponty and I used to talk about it and concluded that we just didn’t have the time.”  Lévi-Strauss was one of Alexander Cockburn’s favorite writers. Alex was especially enthused by his memoir Tristes Tropiques. So enthused, in fact, that  Cockburn titled the second volume of his own memoirs The Golden Age is In Us, which he attributed to Lévi-Strauss: “The golden age, which blind superstition had placed behind (or ahead of) us, is in us.” Wrongly, it turned out. A few months after the book was published, a letter arrived in Petrolia from Paris, bearing the return address of Claude Lévi-Strauss, informing that Alex that the phrase belonged to Rousseau, not him. In what I came to call the Cockburn Pirouette, Alex used this “l’erreur” to justify his hatred of fact-checkers, telling me as he waved the letter in front of my face: “Now, Jeffrey, imagine if Verso had fact-checked the Golden Age. I’d never have received a handwritten note from the greatest genius of our time.”

+ At least 1.5 million American children have had their food aid cut off by the Trump administration since last July. Let those kids work the night shift mopping up the bloody floors at the slaughterhouse if they want to eat. They’ve gotta learn there are no handouts in America!

+ OpenAI’s Sam Altman says that even when AI is in full-operation will won’t reduce the 40-hour work week for human labor.

+ The cybersecurity firm Cloudflare reports what we all suspected: that bots outnumber humans online. According to the company’s Radar dashboard, bots account for 57.5% of all HTTP requests to HTML content, with humans lagging behind at 42.5%. It’s a bot-eat-bot World Wide Web.

+ The Financial Post on how the “Trump Trade” is becoming a stock market loser: “Ned Davis Research’s Trump Trade Index — which consists of a dozen exchange-traded funds expected to benefit from White House policies on homebuilding, defense spending and the re-shoring of manufacturing — has slumped about 16% since May after clobbering the S&P 500 Index at the beginning of the year. Several of the ETFs in the gauge are now trading lower for the year.”

+ Since Trump’s reelection, total corporate boardroom diversity has fallen to a new low of 40% (from a high of 72% in 2021) with only Asians seeing a slight uptick.  Women directors have fallen below 30% after reaching a high of 48% in 2023, while blacks and Hispanics have both dropped to less than 5%, from highs of 32% and 8% respectively in 2021.

+ Mark Zuckerberg has struck a deal with Chris Ruddy to train Meta’s AI apps on Ruddy’s right-wing media site, Newsmax.

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+ How ICE Talks When It Talks About Migrants: Body camera footage from a Border Patrol/ICE raid on a Home Depot in Los Angeles recorded an agent saying: “There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he’s wet; he was just sitting in that minivan.” A text chain revealed an agent referring to “tonks everywhere selling food.” In another video, an agent bragged, “Yeah, just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out.” “Tonk” is Border Patrol street slang for the sound a metal flashlight makes when used to beat a migrant in the head.

+ David Brouillette, the ICE agent who shot a 25-year-old father in the head in Maine, left this phone message to his ex-wife on November 25, 2025: “Every single female in your bloodline is nothing but a disgusting fat ++++ and all of you should have your fucking throat cut.”

+ ICE is now using children as bait to lure relatives to come claim their kids, then arrest them when they show up. It doesn’t get much scummier than this, America…

+ ICE officers say morale is lower under Trump than it was under Biden…Quit, then, and do something else with your life! I don’t know who would hire you. Blackwater, maybe…

+ In Herman Melville’s 1849 novel Redburn, the narrator is on the docks in Liverpool observing throngs of German immigrants (after the revolution of 1848) ready to board a ship bound for the US and comments: “There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled, that, in a noble breast, should forever extinguish prejudices of national dislikes…. You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world…. [O]ur blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world….” This is, of course, the America Trump and his xenophobic allies reject in their drive to inflame the “prejudices of national dislikes.”

+ Edward Norton on American exceptionalism: “I don’t want to use too harsh a word, but I think if you’re lucky enough to travel, you’ll see something that I don’t think a lot of Americans do. We have this enduring narrative of American exceptionalism, you know, like America’s cultural superiority.  I don’t think people fully grasp the degree to which we’re going to ghettoize ourselves in terms of education, in terms of health, and in so many other areas. You know, we’re not anywhere near the top of what other people are experiencing. If we keep embracing this idea of pride in regression, where is that going to take us? It’s not going to take us to a place that we’re happy about for our kids.”

+++

Dead Party Walking… From the Washington Post:

Six individuals donated at least $100,000 in June to the Democratic National Committee or its Grassroots Victory Fund committee. By comparison, in the first half of 2026, 35 individuals gave $100,000 or more to the Democratic committee or its fund. Meanwhile, the figure for the Republican National Committee alone is 154. And its many fundraising committees have raised millions more from megadonors.”

The DNC ended June with $16.3 million in cash and $18.5 million in debt — putting it about $2.2 million in the red. It is a staggering hole compared to the numbers of the Republican National Committee, which held $128.5 million and reported no debt.

+ Stephen Miller, one of the weirdest freaks in the country, on the midterms: “The very survival of freedom, liberty, humanity, your family, your children and your future depends on ensuring that we do not allow communism to take hold. AOC, Bernie, Omar—these are people who, even 10-15 years ago, would have been relegated to the outermost fringes. They are now the heart of the party. The Democrats have become the party of freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies.” (10 years ago, Bernie would have defeated HRC in the primaries had the DNC not rigged the process to save her.)

+ “Canadians made 29.1 million trips to the United States in 2025, down from 39 million in 2024. Their travel spending declined by $2.3 billion in the United States while climbing $2.5 billion overseas.” If Canadians were staying in Canada, one might argue that the decline in travel to the US was the single biggest contribution Trump has made to fighting climate change. But apparently they’re vacationing in Europe, Asia, and Central and South America instead of here.

+ Credit where credit is due: Falling asleep at Lindsey Graham’s funeral is the perfect response to Lindsey Graham’s funeral…

+ For what it’s worth (not much, probably), a new poll shows James Talarico up by five points over Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race, which seems to be all about meat and who eats it and how bloody the hunk of flesh is.

+ Mike Johnson on the antics of the renegades in his own party: “I’m sick of this shit.” I’m reminded of Orson Scott Card’s superior sequel to Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead….

+ AOC: “I’m not a militant leftist.” Yeah, I think you’ve made that clear…

+ Trump ordered that signs be erected near the National Museum of American History warning visitors about “inaccurate information,” which in true Trump style is itself “inaccurate information.”

+ Former 60 Minutes reporter Cecilia Vega on the editorial meddling of the Bari Weiss regime at CBS News: “I’ve gone head-to-head with editors for 25 years in this business, but never in my career, until now, have I felt that those edits, that those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics.” To replace seasoned reporters like Vega, Weiss has brought on Ross Douthat, the moralizing rightwing columnist at the NYT, as a “correspondent.”

+ Trump the Seismologist: “Venezuela is a very happy place. [More than 5200 dead and 50,000 missing.] They had a tragic event that took place a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks ago. They had a…they had a movement, a shifting of earth that was unbelievable. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. They haven’t seen anything like it.  I guess you would call it an earthquake.”

I guess you would…(What happens when the White House runs out of wall space for Trump’s gilted bric-brac? Is that the real purpose of the Ballroom?

+++

+ More than a million acres of forest and grasslands have already burned in Oregon with three months remaining in the “fire season,” but the Trump administration has already denied emergency funding for two of Oregon’s largest fires, East Evans Creek and Rowe Creek complexes, in a bizarre act of petty political retaliation in a region of the state that went heavily for Trump.

+ A pyrocumulus cloud formed above the Cascade Mountain town of Sisters, Oregon, this week, as the extreme heat and intense Akawa Butte Fire merged to fuel its own voracious weather system.

+ Oregon has come to the aid of Team Canada in delivering smoke to the Midwest, East Coast and even Deep South…

+ Trump: “Green New Scam where we were scammed. The whole country was; I wasn’t scammed. I got it right from the beginning… they were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn’t watch your television; they wanted to watch the debate. Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn’t blowing. Remember that?”

+ Active fires and smoke in the US. (We don’t hear Trump rage about the fires in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, do we?)

+ Does ingestion of microplastics increase your risk of heart attack? New research suggests it does: “Plastic particles were found in 40 percent of patients with chronic heart disease and just 32 percent of those with normal coronary arteries. …Polyethylene, a common plastic used in bags and bottles, was detected in 97 percent of patients who tested positive for microplastics or nanoplastics.”

+ The bison are having a productive summer in Yellowstone. When Sinead advised us to: “Fight the real enemy!” They knew exactly who and what to attack…

+ The Japanese have created a new term for days of extreme heat (40C), such as those they are experiencing this week: “Kokushobi,” which translates as “cruel heat day.”

+ Emanuel Macron, the President of France:  the President of France: “The situation we’re facing today is the hardest we’ve ever recorded, the hardest since World War II.”

+ Pedro Sanchez, the Prime Minister of Spain:  “This climate emergency is exceeding every threshold and scale that scientists have long warned all of Spain and Europe about.”

+ Goats are being deployed in Spain and France to create fuel breaks in an attempt to slow the spread of the wildfires scorching both nations.

+ Madeliene Schwartz writing in The Dial: “France needs to prepare for the fact that future summers will be far worse than this one”.

+ Germany’s RKI Department of Health estimates that more than 9,800 people have already died in Germany from heat-related causes with more than 40 °C temperatures in the forecast.

+ Drought has now been declared in more than half of England, including  London, East Anglia, the Thames Valley, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, the West Midlands, and Wessex.

+ Drought has now been declared in more than half of England, including  London, East Anglia, the + Shell Oil, the killers of Ken-Saro Wiwa and a recidivist war profiteer, cashed in on the US/Israeli bombing of Iran with a reported $10 billion in profits from oil and gas production in the second quarter of 2026 (double the same period last year), reaching the highest point since 2022.

+ More than half of all the energy produced in California in the month of May came from solar, largely made possible because of an increase in battery storage.

+ Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ): “Socialism doesn’t work. The Democratic Party doesn’t work, and certainly Canada isn’t working because they are so far left. This should be a warning shot to them. You better come to America, say, ‘We’re sorry, we’re gonna mend our ways and do what we used to do and groom and maintain the forest.’”

Reporter: When is it going to be safe to eat lettuce again?

Trump: I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. There’s this, there’s this food coming in, I guess. From Mexico. I think what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna put a major tariff on Mexico because of the lettuce, and we’re gonna put a big tariff on Canada because of the smoke.

The only pieces of lettuce the guy’s ever eaten have been the wilted little shreds on a Big Mac.

+ Measles cases are at record highs; more than 18,000 people in 45-states have now been infected with the “explosive diarrhea parasite,” and a highly mutated variant of COVID-19 known as Cicada is picking up steam, but RKF Jr. is starting a … cooking show.

+ All summer, Lola and I have seen this garter snake on our morning walks, which makes her home in a crack in the sidewalk and has somehow survived cars, bikes, teenagers, lawn mowers, weed whackers and a Great Horned Owl, which I’ve seen with several other snakes in its formidable talons. I’m no Ophidiologist, but I think this is a Puget Sound garter snake (it lacks the distinctive red stripe of our Oregon Gartner snakes), which puts it about 100 miles south of its normal range here in our little canyon. She’s really beautiful, and her iridescent green stripes flare in the sunlight.

+++

+ I never envisioned saying this, but “Good for you, Katy Perry!“

+ James Joyce on William Butler Yeats: “A tiresome idiot.” Joyce’s astute assessment of the over-hyped Yeats hasn’t stopped people from quoting him so enthusiastically that we finally had to ban any lines from his poem The Second Coming from the pages, digital though they may now be, of CounterPunch.

+ Trump’s corruption is so blatant that he practically boasts about his avarice, saying he learned during his first term that “nobody cares” if he pockets bribes or profits off inside information.  But such venality is hardly a new feature in American politics. One of the most consequential votes in the history of the US Senate took place in 1850 on the Fugitive Slave Act, the law that lit the fuse for the Civil War.  One of the decisive speeches that turned the tide in favor of the noxious measure was made by the Boston lawyer, diplomat and blowhard, Daniel Webster, who claimed he considered slavery an “abomination before God,” but put the Constitution’s protection of property rights above any moral considerations. A couple of days after Webster’s speech, a Washington banker–DC being a city not only of slave-holders but slave traders, whose auctions of human beings could be heard from outside the Capitol–forgave all of the rotund barrister’s outstanding debts, which were apparently considerable. A year later, Webster, a man JFK celebrated in Profiles in Courage for his moral rectitude, argued that anyone who violated the Fugitive Slave Act by assisting, hiding or liberating escaped slaves had committed not just a felony but treason.

+ A precursor to the J6 insurrectionists: “By 1856, the [new Republican] Party was coherent enough to nominate the charismatic John C. Frémont [an abolitionist] for president, who, though he lost to the Democrat Buchanan, polled more than a million votes and carried eleven states in the Northeast and the upper Midwest and whose victory seemed sufficiently possible to Gov. Henry West of Virginia that he was reputed to have made contingency plans to send in the militia to stop Frémont’s inauguration.” (The War Before the War by Anthony Delbanco)

+ The French-Algerian Marxist Louis Althusser didn’t have sexual relations until 1948. Indeed, he’d never kissed a woman until then. (To be a little fair, he had spent five years in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.) When he finally had sex for the first time, the French resistance fighter Hèléne Rytman (his future wife and 8 years his senior), Althusser was so traumatized and depressed by the experience (he said he felt only “repulsion”) that he was committed to the psych ward at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, where he was subjected to 24 electroshock sessions. Thirty-two years later, Althusser would strangle Rytman to death in their suite at the École Supérieure Normale in what the investigating psychiatrists described as “an iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression.” Althusser was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial and was once again locked up in the psych ward, from which he would never return. In his memoir, L’Avenir Dure Longtemps (The Future Lasts Forever), Althusser claimed he killed her out of love: I killed a woman who was everything to me during a crisis of mental confusion, she who loved me to the point of wanting only to die because she could not continue living. And no doubt in my confusion and unconsciousness I ‘did her this service,’ which she did not try to prevent, but from which she died.” But several friends of Rytman say she was on the brink of leaving him when he squeezed the life out of her, as she lay prone on their bed. Althusser, the celebrated Marxist, who admitted later in life that he’d only read volume one of Capital and was MIA during the May ’68 protests while his aging nemesis Jean-Paul Sartre was on the streets with rebellious students, spent the rest of his years confined to mental hospitals outside Paris, first in Soisy-sur-Seine, then the Centre Marcel Rivière in La Verrière. The vicissitudes of Althusser’s confinement and attempts to “heal” his mental “disorder” wouldn’t have surprised his former student, Michel Foucault.

+ When you’re scanning the shelves of Portland’s most eccentric (and probably best) used bookstore, Mother Foucault’s, don’t insult Poseidon or you might spend the next 10 years wandering the stacks, looking for the exit, which, all things considered, might be a welcome alternative to what’s going down outside. My haul for the afternoon: a copy of Melville’s Benito Cereno in print large enough for my eroded eyes to read, a collection of Hemingway’s war journalism, an illustrated cultural history of Paris’ outer ring, the 13^th through 20^th Arrondissements, illustrated with peculiar line drawings and hand-drawn maps, post-911 “dialogues” with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida on “terrorism,” Derrida’s own Dissemenations, a history of Indian art, a large format book on the photography of Native Americans, the poet William Bronk’s volume Life Supports, CP contributor Ken Knabb’s 1991 book, The Relevance of Rexroth–all for less than $100, even in the time of Trumpflation. The problem is, of course, that I’ve been trying to, as the librarians say, deaccession the ziggurat-like mounds of books on the floor of my office, in the halls, in the bedroom, but they keep growing, instead….

+ Kenneth Rexroth, before reading some of his poems one night in Berkeley: “Well, what would you like to hear: sex, mysticism or revolution?” A woman in the audience shouted, “What’s the difference?” (From Knabb’s excellent book.)

+ In response to my list of the top jazz recordings of the year for the Francis Davis Jazz Critics poll, CounterPuncher Patrick Powers sent me Tory Slusher’s evocative cover of Monk’s “Ruby Dear” on electric guitar as his. Patrick’s got a point. Take a listen…

+ I posted a Sound Grammar piece on Jimi Hendrix in last Weekend’s CP, which elicited an email from a reader in Scotland, who instructed me to listen to Hendrix’s version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” for the BBC, played about five times as fast as Wolf played anything except craps. If you haven’t heard it before, you’re in for a treat, as long as you turn it up, like all the way up…This album cover gave some of us white kids on the Southside of Indy–okay, just me, maybe–hope that if we couldn’t have Hendrix’s hair, we could at least have Noel Redding’s or Mitch Mitchell’s.

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Frenchmen…or My Life in Theory
Emily Eakin
(Penguin)

Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian
Michael Braddick
(Verso)

Inescapable: Facing Up to Forever Chemicals
F. Marina Schauffler
(Johns Hopkins)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Change the Wind
Corey King
(Western)

Mother of the Blues: the Complete Paramount Recordings, 1923-1928
Ma Rainey
(Black Swan)

The Confuser
Robyn Hitchcock
(Glowing Green Frog)

Driven to Despair

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” – HL Mencken