Ordnance office
Hot rain sulfur and the cost, broken and cancerful, pestilent fields, necrotic river
Zohran Mamdani was invented in the vicinity of the back booth of the Village Lantern on Bleecker Street circa 2003. You can tell because of his command of the dialectic.
Aufhebung, Amreeka.
‘...the American rebellion was a sideshow to a far greater imperial drama. Britain, arguably, decided to cut its losses with the unruly thirteen colonies to better safeguard its more lucrative possessions in the Caribbean and South Asia. Meanwhile, every Indian schoolkid knows of Tipu Sultan’s last stand, and generations of Britons were raised on tales of colonial derring-do and the menace of the “tiger of Mysore,” Tipu’s sobriquet. (An ornate automatonthat Tipu once possessed, of a tiger eating a British soldier, is probably the most well-known object in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.) In more recent years, the culture wars waged by India’s ruling Hindu nationalists have complicated the image of Tipu and his father, who some now have recast as bloodthirsty Muslim warlords rather than icons of national resistance. But that was not the case when, as a teen-ager, multiple decades ago, I went with my family on a tour of the ruins of Tipu’s fortress. Guides spoke of the monthlong siege that ended only because of the treachery of a local noble who turned on the sultan and allowed British troops to scale the walls. Tipu himself was found slain near a passageway once used to bring water into the fort; it’s dubbed the Water Gate. “First Watergate, Seringapatam,” the guide told us, elongating the consonants in melodious, if broken, English. “Second Watergate, Washington.”’
‘Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and foreign solidarity activists northeast of Ramallah as residents tried to reach land threatened with confiscation.
‘Residents of Turmus Aya and Abu Falah launched a march towards the al-Badoud area where Palestinian landowners have been struggling to access their property during escalating settler violence, the official Wafa news agency reported.
‘An elderly Palestinian man was wounded in the attack while several solidarity activists were sprayed with pepper spray.
‘In a separate incident, settlers stormed an area near Palestinian homes on the outskirts of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, under the protection of Israeli forces. Settlers threw stones at a house and tried to pour a toxic substance into the family’s water tank.
‘The Kaabneh family has faced near-daily attacks since settlers established an illegal outpost near their home about two years ago, Wafa reported.’
General Washington, Town Destroyer, to Major General John Sullivan, 1779: ‘The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin the crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more…’
The Haudenosaunee do not forget.
Eight, seven