Why I Feel As Though I Have To Go, Plus

Some more stupid stuff the newspapers said, plus music

Aug 26, 2025

Small cemetery in Hiezu, Tottori, Japan (photo credit Weldon Berger)

Why I Feel As Though I Have To Go

As you all know, I’m intent on leaving the country. I think it’s the right thing for me to do, and I feel as though I’ll die sooner if I don’t. I had originally hoped to be out of here around the end of this year but family matters seem to be dictating that it’ll be next summer, which exposes me to more psychic erosion but also gives me more time to raise money. Given the pace at which the fundraising is going, that’s a good thing.

Here’s the rationale, for those of you who’ve not seen it all in one place. I don’t mean it to be maudlin and I hope you won’t take it that way. It just is, as the kids say, what it is.

I have stage 4 (metastatic) cancer, and I have precious relatives overseas with whom I’d like to spend whatever time I have remaining, and who want me in proximity during that time. I have no idea how long that will be; it’s been more than five years since the diagnosis, and the initial prognosis was 18-36 months, so who knows. Not me. One hopes for another five years but regardless, why wait (other than the financial/logistic issues).
My housing, food, and medical care (including doctors, cancer meds/infusions, and a bunch of other shit) are all subsidized by the federal government, and all of those subsidies are on the post-midterms (if we have midterms) chopping block. I’ve been hungry and I’ve been homeless twice and while a homeless white guy with the chops to navigate the system is better off than most people even with the degree of mental illness that put me on the streets, I’m a lot older now and who knows if there will even be a system to navigate. I don’t want to risk it.
Even though I know people who can help me with immigration stuff, getting an extended visa will require me to demonstrate that I have some value as a human being; that means I have to write and photograph my little heart out twixt now and when it comes time to persuade the immigration folks abroad that I’m worth having around for a while—another reason the delay in leaving may be as useful as it is agonizing. I love writing. I love taking pictures. I get better at both when I do them regularly. I need the motivation to overcome the profound fatigue associated with depression and the cancer treatments and I’m not gonna find it just sitting around here stewing in the juices of incipient fascism and awaiting my doom. Got to have something on the horizon.
I love crows and trains. Hawai’i doesn’t have either to speak of, although the local biologists are working on rebuilding the native population of the former. My destination has mass quantities of both.

Regarding that third point, while I don’t have a lot of readers the ones I do have are very smart (and handsome!) and may well have suggestions about where I can try to place my writing to reestablish a history that got interrupted many-some years ago. Let me hear them, please. And if you’ve not already done so, please consider enrolling in a free or paid subscription, and spread my stuff around to people you think might like it.

Crow in Yanaka Cemetery, home to Japan’s last shogun (photo credit Weldon Berger)

Ueno Station in Tokyo (photo credit Weldon Berger)

I’m also fond of cemeteries, particularly small, very local ones. We have a lot of those in Hawai’i, even on Oahu, but not nearly so many, nor, except for the Native Hawaiian burial grounds which aren’t meant to be visitor sites no matter how well-intentioned, nearly so old as in Japan. I like to pay my respects and document the congregation of souls.

So I have reasons for leaving beyond mortality and family and fear, but those three are the weightiest.

More stupid stuff in the newspapers

Reuters, which came up in yesterday’s musings on billionaires, ran a story on the occasion of the regime banning US flag burning. Ostensibly the act applies only to flags torched in connection with violence, but violence is in the eye of the beholder and needn’t exist to be seen. The headline reads “Trump orders crackdown on US flag burning and desecration, raising free speech concern”.

This is an indication that we no longer have free speech; rather, we have speech by permission. You can lose your job, go to jail, get deported for speech (or photoshopped tattoos) the regime doesn’t favor, whether words or images or performance. Maybe whatever the regime does to you will be remediated; maybe it won’t.

Reuters isn’t there yet. Most of the institutional press aren’t there yet. The New York Times isn’t even in the same galaxy. From Dan Froomkin:

The closest the New York Times newsroom will come to telling readers the truth, for instance, is to say that Trump is “promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism,” or that certain actions “increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries” behave.

The American Prospect is not stupid; this is just Harold Meyerson writing in it on one of the things that other outlets aren’t recognizing as part of the regime’s assault on what we had of a democracy. Worker rights are inseparable from democracy; they’ve been under attack here since they first began to take shape, but they’re now losing the legal protections enshrined since the New Deal, leaving workers with only extralegal options for collective action.

The National Labor Relations Act—that pillar of American democracy that gives workers the right to bargain collectively with their employers—was enacted 90 years ago this summer. Its constitutionality was upheld two years later by the Supreme Court, and no successful challenge to its constitutionality has been brought in the subsequent 88 years. Until last week, when the avowedly far-right Fifth Circuit decided otherwise.
Today, the NLRA hovers somewhere between de facto and de jure nullification. It’s been slowly eroding for at least half a century, as employer resistance to it has heightened, and as the penalties to employers for violating its terms have weakened. Currently, the fact that the five-member National Labor Relations Board is down to just two members—not enough to constitute a quorum—means the Board can make no rulings. This enables employers who’ve been found to have violated workers’ rights by lower NLRB administrative courts to appeal those findings and penalties to the Board, which cannot rule on anything—essentially, giving those employers leeway to keep on doing what they’re doing, however illegal it may be.

Much joy in the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos precincts, among many others.

Zohran Mamdani is looking good in his bid for the New York City mayoralty. Ramesh Ponnuru allows in the pages of the Washington Post as how candidates succeeding with coherent, concrete visions for the betterment of everybody but billionaires and corporate pirates are bad for the Democratic party. I’m not at all a fan of AI taking over opinion pages even though a current iteration could easily churn out this sort of evergreen tripe, but I wouldn’t mind some high-school kid replacing ol’ Ramesh. Most of them have got to be less callow and more politically sophisticated.

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