Blue Metropolis turned 4 a few days ago. What started as a casual pandemic project, turned into a monthly rendezvous whose readership keeps growing. Thank you all for being here! If you enjoy this content, and you’re able to, consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $5/month or $50/year. Your support means a lot!
If you live in Michigan, be sure to check out Ma’amoul Press’ pop-up at Spotlite Detroit. Aya and Leila were kind enough to sell some Offbeat Citrus shirts in support of Gaza Poet Society’s campaign. If you don’t live in Michigan, you can support the campaign here, or by ordering this t-shirt directly from Offbeat Citrus.
In an old house in West Philadelphia, I stretch the hours of July in the company of a sweet cat as my roommate. The tender solitude of a slow life leaks through the large kitchen window overlooking a lush backyard the owners of this house have spent years cultivating. I eat my way into a sense of “home” finely chopping garlic, mixing it with labneh, which I spread in circular motion on a blue plate. I garnish the middle with chopped black olives, mince a large piece of makdous, and finish with a sprinkle of za’atar and a drizzle of spicy olive oil. On TikTok a man tries to re-order the same grocery cart from two years ago on his Walmart account and posts receipts showing how his bill went from ~ $120 in 2022 to over $400 in 2024 for the exact same items.
It’s sunflower season, and I walk everywhere in the city. Start on Market Street and keep heading east until I’m in lockstep with myself 4 years ago, when Alex and I drove down from New York during the last election. Both of us foreigners moving around America like fish in roiling waters observing the mechanics of a strange place where theatrics govern all interactions. Back then, we stayed in a room with bunk beds somewhere in East Philly and for a couple of days interviewed various groups and individuals about their prospects and plans under a Biden presidency. You could feel the electricity in the air, held breaths looking for a salvation that never came.
By the convention center, euphoria, delusion, and bitterness converged into one erratic melting pot. Everyone was chasing a high, eyes on the present and an inner compass too broken to gauge the future. Most things tend to be a big show in America. A political debate is a stand-up comedy skit with lives on the line. A sports event is buttressed with a cheerleading squad and/or a concert. An election watch party is a costume party complete with witty signs, and a never ending supply of beer. I joke that Americans are loud because they’re perpetually on an imaginary stage performing a one-person show. Everywhere you look, the architecture of the mundane is papered over with spectacle.
I remember us the day after we came back to Brooklyn, walking around Park Slope looking to grab coffee when the cars around us erupted in frantic honking, cheers, and euphoria. How within hours people got together for an impromptu dance party by Grand Army Plaza to celebrate the evil man winning against the (more) evil man. A day earlier, Alex was asking a Jamaican asylum-seeking couple in a Philly church whether they believed their pending status could be resolved under a Biden presidency. A moment of hesitation followed by a reluctant “we’re hopeful.” Three years later, per Reuters, Biden has deported more asylum seekers than Trump. And as his crowning achievement, he has greenlit and bankrolled one of the worst genocides in modern history funded by our tax dollars. The mythology of lesser evil requires you to forget how wide a spectrum evil runs.
The truth is this: as a settler colony, the United States is the sum total of its mass graves. Genocide is at the foundation of its identity. Within that framework, dehumanization is baked into the dough of this nation’s collective consciousness. It cannot, by design, have a political spectrum. This conditioning is what allows many self-described “liberals” to dismiss genocide as a foreign policy matter that cannot compete with their domestic concerns, failing to realize that the line between foreign and domestic is fictitious. It’s the same dehumanization that vilifies poverty, commodifies healthcare, ties it to employment, and turns education into a luxury good to keep its citizens saddled with unmanageable debt for the rest of their lives. The settler colony has long ago seized your birthrights and uses its “liberal” wing to sell them back to you at a discount. All liberalism does is normalize the commodification, incrementally moving the goalposts closer to fascism. To succeed, it relies on an overworked, underpaid, indebted citizenry addicted to hyper-consumption and convenience to keep it going. There is no greater ally to the Republican party than the Democratic one, and identity politics is its favorite and most efficient foot soldier.
**
Fall turns into winter, turns into spring, turns into summer, and as we inch closer to the one year anniversary since the start of the genocide, the “lesser” evil is on TV cosplaying liberation through representation. Like clockwork, it is once again the most crucial election of our lifetimes, and Americans are once again sold the myth that their fates are contingent on their ballots. Cue the coconut tree memes. Cue the nothingburger statements that ring hollow against a backdrop of decapitated children. On my phone this morning, a father carefully places his 9 year old girl’s head next to her shrouded body. A few miles away from that scene, on the other side of the fence, settlers show up to the Sde Teiman camp to demand the release of the guards found guilty of gang raping a Palestinian detainee. A missile is a missile is a missile no matter who the commander in chief is. It will kill, maim, shred limbs, and char flesh regardless of whether the leader who ordered it menstruates, or not. The president’s allegiance is to the stakeholders of the empire. Not its citizens.
This is what our ruling has decided will be normal.
—Aaron Bushnell
The US’s unwavering support for the zionist project is an existential matter. Should the project fail, it knows it will have to answer to its centuries of genocide(s) in its own backyard. It will spend every last cent of your money to ensure the survival of its most prized military outpost. In the same breath, on its own turf, it will outlaw homelessness, and restrict bodily autonomy in a sea of other equally horrific legislations to keep its voters subservient to its might.
When we visualize violence we think of a physical altercation or war; an event that happens at a given moment, in a given space. While not wrong, restricting our definition to these physical manifestations is dangerously myopic. Violence is a mutable element. It can present bureaucratically, as legislation at home and as 2,000 ton bunker-buster bombs dropped on tents full of people you’ve never met but had a hand in killing some 5,000 miles away.
Seemingly innocuous gestures can be violent. Scrolling past the video of a massacre to “protect your peace” is violent. Swiping your credit card at the grocery store and paying sales tax —a portion of which will get rerouted to the occupation army committing livestream genocide— is violent. Pledging your support to a candidate under the guise that they’re not as evil as the alternative is an act of violence, of which you too will bear the consequences. All of these are contingent on your continued participation in the system. You can choose to get off the ride. You can unlearn your binary view of the world. You can renounce your need for a hero to worship, and uncouple from personality cults. You can lean into others who share your troubles and frustrations. Together, we are so much more powerful than we give ourselves credit for.
Further reading:
Joe Biden’s Gaza Problem: It’s Not Just the Pundit Class That Wants Him Gone, by Dan Sheehan, Lithub
Elements of Anti-Semitism, by Jake Romm, Parapraxis Mag
Lebanon’s Doudou Shot Is More Than a Rite of Passage, by Farrah Berrou, Punch Drink
The Land is Holy, by noam keim, Radix Coop
The Coin, by Yasmin Zaher, Catapult