Hiya from the skies en route to Antigua. I was in Cannes recently, at a travel industry conference, talking to various people who work in the field about the picture of the world that their work gave them. The picture of our appetites, interests, fears, hopes. Were Americans traveling less frequently, for instance, with the catastrophic political climate they were experiencing at home? (Yes and no, it seemed — the very well-to-do were still traveling, maybe even more so, but booking more chaotically, because of economic concerns at home, and, perhaps, fatalistic YOLO-vibes.) Certainly travel to the States was in decline — partly due to the gutting of security measures from the reckless, bad faith efforts of DOGE, and otherwise, but also in part due to fears about personal safety (from government agencies) in the US.
In some of these conversations I had, I explained what a strange year it had been to view America, and Americanness, mostly from abroad, as I had done. To be in Western China at the fumbling bumbling roll out of the tariffs, in South Africa during the mortifying circus of welcoming refugees from an invented white genocide, in Mexico when the lawyer who represented a student protestor was themselves detained by border agents… And, now, here I am, on my way to the southern Caribbean, to Antigua, some 500-odd miles from Caracas, as the American imperial project revs back into gear, illegally invading a foreign country to steal its oil, and kidnapping a world leader on sovereign soil, again.
The fair I went to in Cannes took place in early December, a short while after Hurricane Melissa brought damage and destruction to huge swaths of Jamaica. So at the time, I sought out a bunch of brands based there to ask about the reactions, the rebuilding processes, and to see if there were something that we as writers, photographers could do to participate. By and large the places I spoke with were already reopened, ready to welcome guests who, it seemed, were avoiding the country not because of perceived damages so much as they were avoiding the Caribbean because of the US’s willy nilly bombing of speedboats at the time. Really. Of course jokes were made about Americans and their grasp of geography (the distance from Jamaica to Venezuela being greater than that from New York to Tampa, Florida), but, still, we seem to sit with this feeling of helplessness, impotence, that nothing could then, or can even now be done to stop our president from committing crimes, from destabilizing, terrorizing, and embarrassing us all.
“You can't just have a country who does that and looks the other way,” Seymour Hersh says in Cover Up, the new documentary by Laura Poitras about Hersh’s life and work. For those who don’t know of Hersh, the film is a good introduction to our greatest living investigative reporter, and also, it seems, a timely challenge. How will we, for instance, hold our seemingly shame proof, and abjectly criminal president to task if merely calling out his crimes and repulsive behavior (in the way that ousted Nixon, but which our present President is happy to brag about himself) does not do the trick?
Something else the documentary made me think about is that we really treat journalists terribly in this country (unless of course they cozy up to power and celebrity so that we can glamorize them). I had Hersh on my podcast, when I had one, back in 2016, and had the very best time engaging with him, with all of him (and one of the better bits of Poitras’s film is showing Hersh to be human, with bubbling emotions beneath the film hero’s scrappiness that has made his work so extraordinary), but the process made me despair about the work that he does, denied as it is by those in power, and perhaps discounted by those who’d rather not look on our ugly truths as a country. I’m generalizing, but still. Maybe if Hersh were less diligent in exposing uncomfortable truths, he would be on 24-hour talk shows every day, instead of on Substack — “slumming it,” as he says people might call it.
Anyway he is here, on this app and in this reality. And so are we. So, what will we do? If we can all generally agree that a crime exposes the criminal (in this case, an insecure old man desperate for recognition, a convicted felon and grifter who openly offered a gift to oil companies if they backed his campaign to avoid further prosecution), I wonder if it also exposes the witnesses, shows us who we are.
Anymore I can only wonder what our future selves will think of our actions. What our future selves will wish we had done. Will we look back and be proud of how we responded, how we rallied. Or not.
Anyway. Wishing you the world whereever you are in it. Xoxox