God Bless America

Strippers, Hi Jolly, Trump and Harris.

As an independent artist with no degree and a giant mouth, your subscriptions help me do the work I want, unconstrained by collectors or corporations. If you like my art, you can also buy my books and prints.

You people

In Quartzite, Arizona, there stands the most orientalist tomb that has ever marked a death.  It is a pyramid, topped by a camel. Its inscription reads: “Here lies hi jolly, born somewhere in Syria, faithful subject of the United States of America, your last camel caravan has gone”

For a long time, this tomb represented for me my country, in all its callowness.  Not just the iconography, but the name of the deceased.  Hi Jolly was in reality Haji Ali, an Ottoman born in 1828, who had come to America to take part in an ill-fated attempt to use camels to haul loads through the Southwest desert, only to lie forever beneath the stone equivalent of a Camel Cigarette package.  This is what we do, I thought. Take someone from an old, rich culture, shorten their name with our bumpkin twang, slap some kitsch atop their body, and call it a day.  Poor Hi Jolly.  What the fuck.

But this is only how it looks when you look too closely.  You need to step back a bit.  Hi Jolly was not born Ali.  He was Philip Tedro, of Smyrna, half Greek, half Syrian-Christian, born smack-dab in the middle of the Greek War of Independence, which ended when he was six.  As a young adult, Philip converted to Islam and took a Turkish name. I doubt he did it from belief.  Seen from another angle, the “Ali”, with its bolster of “Haji”, looks more like a protective disguise to shield him from the blood-soaked ethnonationalism of the nineteenth century, in which the Greek subjects of the sultan had a new and precarious place.  

Enter Uncle Sam.  At the same moment as Philip Tedro was taking a Turkish pseudonym, the US army was contemplating a scheme to use camels as pack animals, hauling loads across the western desert.  They needed camel drivers.  The call went out across the Ottoman Empire, and a before you know it, eight Greeks with Turkish names had boarded a ship to Amreeka.  Our man Ali, né Philip Tedro, was among them.  

Once here, Ali worked for the US Camel Corps, then, after that project collapsed, as a scout, prospector, and petty participant in the crimes of westward expansion. He got his new name, Hi Jolly. He became American.

America, with its bumpkin guilelessness, its innocence thin as a surgically reconstructed hymen, proved the perfect home for him.  These hicks had no idea where he came from. If he was Haji Ali, or Philip Tedro. Turk or Greek.  Who cared anyway.  He was exotic.  They made no further distinctions out west.  If the Old World was just a series of tit-for-tat massacres, in the New World things were new, at least for people like him (massacres were done to others).  Who cared if Americans bastardized his name?   It was better than Smyrna, where anyone could sense his family origin in the lilt and flourish of his vowels.  With friends, he relaxed back into his original heritage, going by Philip Tedro, sometimes spelled Teadrow.  He married in the Greek Orthodox Church.

Hi Jolly died in 1902 in Quartzite, beneath that dummy pyramid.  He remains as a symbol of American self-invention.

(I think now of Ray Alvarez, legendary proprietor of Ray’s Candy Store on Tompkins Square Park.  Ray was not born Ray, just like Philip Tedro was not born either Haji Ali nor Jolly.  Ray was Asghar Ghahraman, an Iranian sailor-poet, who jumped ship in Norfolk in 1963, caught the train to New York, bought a stolen Puerto Rican driver’s license and opened up a shop that makes the best fried Oreos this side of the East River.  This is America, whose ignorance provides a canvas for such protean creativity. God bless the US of A.)

I don’t know shit about America. I am a New Yorker. My mother was born on a kitchen table in Coney Island, and I have never lived anywhere else. I can’t even drive, which means I can’t navigate any American city except my own.   Yet, even I am American enough to have a road trip story.  It was one night in Texas, during the last time Trump reigned. I had just gotten done covering Trump’s child separation horror show the border, drawing mass trials, and the asylum hearings of Quiche kids who were supposed to represent themselves against a hostile state even though they couldn’t speak Spanish, let alone English, and their feet were too short to touch the floor.  Afterward, A. drove me back to the San Antonio airport.  We stopped at a roadside motel.  The pool was supposed to be shut, but there were three people swimming – a guy and two babes in moonlight-colored bikinis, tattoos like the handwriting of Yemaya.  They were strippers on tour, but that night was their break night, so they soaked in the pool, snacking on fast food and smoking blunts.  They had bribed the hotel desk lady to keep the pool open just for them.  (She herself was half Vietnamese and half American, with a mother who killed herself in Vietnam and a GI father who came back for her, to take her to the American suburbs, where she never managed to learn to read.  She made extra money looping the security camera footage so that hookers could bring in their clients to their rooms without the hotel’s Gujarati owners catching wise.)  We passed the joint lip to lip.  This too was America.  Ugly, bloody, rotten, beautiful.   We got so high we could have kissed the sky

*

The fucker won again, and this time undeniably.  He smashed the popular vote.  Wooed all the Dominicans in the Bronx and the dimwitted mayor of Hamtramck, who was pitifully grateful that Trump called South Americans, and not Yemenis, terrorists, at least for a week.  Trump won most Latino guys (something that wouldn’t have surprised most of us if we had thought back to our own abuelos, but is now provoking weepy Instagram Reels about “induction into whiteness). And now he’s filling his cabinet with the sort of politicians favored by Klansmen, crypto scammers, and fluoride-skeptical podcast hosts. His Secretary of Defense nominee is a Christian millenarian who wants to blow up Al Aqsa and build a third temple. He has a Jerusalem cross tattooed across his tit.

Trump won, or more accurately, Kamala lost.  She got nine million fewer votes than Biden. There are so many reasons why. The Biden-Harris administration jumped ass-first into the Gaza Genocide, and Blinken’s Lady Doth Protest Too Much act of tepid disapproval wouldn’t convince a toddler, even a slow one.  Harris ritualistically humiliated the Uncommitted Movement; despite all the undeserved grace they extended her party.  No wonder young people didn’t vote for her.  No wonder she lost Michigan. 

 Also, she won no primaries and seemed to stand for nothing.  There’s also that.

But even though she ran as a Glock-wielding cop with a boner for the border wall, Harris suffered because of voters’ memories of a culture she and most other democrats had abandoned – one cultivated over the last eight years by liberals, progressives, and the left alike.  It’s a censorious, prissy culture, obsessed with academic terminology, easily parodied and repulsive to many, perhaps most.  It gave the fulminating Mussolini-lets of Conservative Think tank Land an easy opening, and god did they take it.

We didn’t deal with the obvious idiocies of our culture, because of fear, enforced by our passion for mutual self-cannibalization.  We crabs love to claw each other back into our barrel. Cancel-culture was an apt term for our psychosis, even though you risk being cancelled for using (Montreal punk Clementine Morrigan has taken these risks for years, and I recommend their work).  It was dumb and destructive, but it made us feel strong, didn’t it, all these dopamine-fueled auto-da-fés on social media?  We confused the power to hurt each other with the power to hurt the powerful.  And here we are.

I’m in Athens now, grateful to be in Not-America.  The crabs in the barrel are literal here. I sketch them at central market.  The next four years will be bad for so many people, with Trump’s cronies sending cops to trawl through our papers, phones, and bodies, in a fevered attempt to purge this country of the impure.  This is a good time to hoard abortion pills and get to know your neighbors. To renew your passports and take care of each other, and keep your mouth shut with the police.

Life Goals

Also, it’s a good time to live, because this is the only life we get.  About a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “We Must Risk Delight after a Summer Full of Monsters”.  (I felt so much freer then, less gagged by social media, less suffocated by social justice culture, without a peanut gallery of haters rattling around inside my head.  I wish, sometimes, I could return to the writer I was.)

In the essay, I wrote about how joy always coexists with horror, and we have to seize delight wherever we can.  We live in a country of Cheezums and thin blue line flags and balls swollen with microplastics, of exurbs so ugly they stab your soul.  But it’s also a country of gorgeous strippers on tour, passing a blunt in a motel pool. It’s also Hi Jolly’s place of refuge.  Hi Jolly. Haji Ali.  Pedro Tedro, a tracker for empire buried under a pile of Orientalist crap in Quartzite, Arizona.  Scion of the Old World.  Symbol of the New.

“I intend to get hotter and weirder,” my best friend Max Fractal told me.  That’s the best revenge.

Everything is fucked.  It’s all a ruin.  The stars still shine all the same.

Thank you to everyone who supports my substack, which I have only sporadically written. My only excuse is that I finished two books this year. I wrote a 430 page history of the Jewish Labor Bund, and I illustrated Ruby Lal’s kids’ book on Empress Nur Jahan. You subscribers help me exist as a mouthy, independent artist, and I’m profoundly grateful.

Also, if you want to support me more, you can always buy art from my shop.