Jeff Sharlet Profile picture
Aug 2, 2018 9 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
A #Vermont thread: Lloyd tells me 3 ways to get to Morrisville. "Which," he adds, "you don't want to do that." He was born in "Morris," but now he lives in Jeffersonville, "Jeff." Lost his job at a sawmill--"ash, mostly," he says, "dries your hands, cracks 'em to the bone"...
...& then his job as a dishwasher, & the his home. Now he's sick. This fly-specked apt is where the county put him. There were farmers in his line, but not Lloyd. "I weren't," he says. "Don't speak French, neither." The two twinned in his mind, farming & French, Vermont-French.
"There's more Vermont-French than you realize," he says. He never learned. Not computers, either, he says. Not the old way or the new. Now old is new: "corporate," by which means farms bought up, "megabucks," 5, 6, a dozen family farms under one hand...
The computers, tho! Have I seen how the kids use them? "They block you out," Lloyd says. "You say, 'Son!' Or, 'Daughter!' They block you out." I ask: You have kids, Lloyd? A son, a daughter. "She's gonna be 18. And"--he pauses--"2nd or 3rd of August, our son'll be 14."
"We don't have the kids anymore," Lloyd says. "Lost 'em to the state." I don't ask. Lloyd says. "Some people made comments about us. But others what was worse than us got their kids back." One couple got their kid back, & then--"state worker never bothered to ask." ...
Ask what, I say. "They said the kid was sweet," says Lloyd. "Sweet?" Asleep, he means to say. He's lost a lot of teeth. Some words come crooked now. The sweet kid: "The state worker never bothered to just peek on him," says Lloyd. "And the kid was dead."
Lloyd would like to know: Do my kids learn the computers? My daughter does. Good, good. "& teach her the roads," he advises. "Take a map. Say, 'We're here. Can you find a way?'" Set her to finding 3 ways. Anywhere to Anywhere. Norwich to Burlington. Morris to Jeff...
"Tell her to see if she can find different roads to get you from here to there," he says. The idea seems urgent to him. He sees his kids once a year. "Most roads leads you from here to there. Not all roads. But most roads take you wherever you want to go." ...
Lloyd consider. "Most of the time," he says. "Right?"

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More from @JeffSharlet

Aug 29, 2018
"Why is there no recognition that one person’s playful transgression is another’s traumatic nightmare?”@kathapolllitt speaks truth about Avital Ronell, power, and the vanities afflicting the humanities: thenation.com/article/power-…
To speak of vanities and the humanities in the same breath is, according to some defenders of Ronell, evidence of one's secret conservatism. No subtle way to put this, so I won't try: such a notion is simultaneously banal and pretentious as fuck.
Ronell's defenders began their letter by declaring they hadn't seen the evidence. Then:
Read 6 tweets
Aug 4, 2018
Reading Dorothy Day, I just learned of NYPD "diet squad," circa 1915, tasked w/ living on bare bones budget - & documenting it for daily papers - & as official rebuttal to those who complained about poverty.
Reading Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness because I recently had the honor of meeting her granddaughter, Martha Hennessy, currently facing possibility of serious prison time for her role in a Plowshares action against a nuclear submarine base: kingsbayplowshares7.org
I went to meet Martha with my friend Peter Manseau, a curator for the Smithsonian. She gave him one of Dorothy Day's rosaries for the museum. I was surprised, tho, telling lefty friends of the encounter, how few had heard of Day. Surprised & dismayed.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 30, 2018
Re: my thread about a troubled border crossing yesterday (threadreaderapp.com/thread/1023612…), some folks telling me I had the right to not give up my camera. Others telling me to get the pictures back. I appreciate the sentiments, but I don't share either...
Seems to be a lot of gray on the legality of the border guard taking my phone, despite the "no phones" sign. Most recent court ruling seems to suggest they can't do an electronic search unless they suspect crime. I don't think they did a electronic search. They just took it.
But the "legality" of men w/ guns taking your camera because you took a picture of them is, to me, beside the point. It's authoritarian if it's illegal, and it's even more authoritarian if it's been encoded in law.
Read 12 tweets
Jul 29, 2018
What do you tell your kids about borders? Crossing into Canada a few days ago, I warned my 9-yr-old, Saira (not her real name), not to giggle. Crossing was a breeze. Coming back, I said, would take longer...
Entering U.S. involved a lot more questions. The guard questioned Saira. Who is, as I said, nine. But she smiled a lot and all was ok; then he told us to turn off the car, & Saira gasped. Border patrol were surrounding car next to us, hands on their guns, shouting...
Our guard had his hand on his gun, too, & his eyes on the car. "Out of the car!" a guard barked. I was confused. It'd pulled up after us. There'd been no search, no time for search. They couldn't have found drugs. A woman emerged...
Read 34 tweets
Jul 19, 2018
The National Prayer Breakfast's organizer, The Family, has a long history of serving as a backchannel for spies, long before #MariaButina. As I write in THE FAMILY, the very first was Manfred Zapp -- Nazi spy...
Starting in 1938, Zapp posed as a German journalist in Manhattan, a glamorous figure who moved among the elite and even made Walter Winchell's gossip columns. But he had another agenda...
Zapp was a lot smoother than #MariaButina. He actually avoided talk of politics, and somehow found himself at dinner with FDR -- whose reelection he had secretly worked against. Authoritarian election meddling is an old practice....
Read 7 tweets
Jul 17, 2018
The Family - the group the organizes the National Prayer Breakfast, and which helped #MariaButina bring in Russian spies - believes Christianity wrongly focuses on "sheep." They believe God has called them to serve the "wolves."
"The more invisible you can make your organization," boasted Doug Coe, longtime leader of The Family & #nationalprayerbreakfast, "the more influence it will have." #MariaButina agrees.
Watergate felon Chuck Colson - released from prison thru intervention of The Family / #NationalPrayerBreakfast - praised it as "veritable underground of Christ's men all through government," admiring its ability to move power behind scenes. So did #MariaButina
Read 4 tweets

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