There's a smell of scorched earth in the air lately, here in America.

It's smoke from Pacific coast wildfires, and it's something more: the warning scent of an authoritarian future we must avoid, even as our society chokes on climate change, racism, social injustice, predatory capitalism and military escalation. Scorched earth is what I see when I close my eyes and think about the direction the USA is going in right now.

In five weeks I'm going to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (even though I wish I could be voting for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders) and hope that the criminal enterprise known as the Republican party is removed from power. This would pull us back from the brink of civil war, which is where four years of Trumpism have left us.

But it will take a fair election to remove these lying crooks from power, and there is little confidence right now that our blatantly corrupt government with its white-supremacist Senate and stolen Supreme Court will conduct a fair election. Even if we manage to kick the crooks out, there is still a sickness in our society, and this is not a sickness that any election can cure.

I do not hate or blame Americans who support Trump, just as I wouldn't blame any victim of a sophisticated con. A sophisticated con is what William Barr, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Steve Mnuchin, Mike Pompeo and Steve Miller are carrying out right now from within their positions inside the federal government. This is a reactionary putsch by a privileged minority. I hope more and more Americans will wake up, understand the urgency of the current moment and unite to remove these fascists from power. We can then work together for a new revolution, a green new deal, an end to military profiteering, a constitution that doesn't suppress the voting power of minorities and urban citizens.

The poet Michael McClure, who died on May 4, 2020 in his home in Oakland, California, was one of five readers at the seminal Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco in 1955 that kicked off the Beat Generation. I always loved his simple and organic poetic style, at once both cosmic and down-to-earth, and I also loved his attention to nature and animals. In an era when visionary causes abounded, he invented his own: an insistence on recognizing all animals as spiritual beings who can teach us more than we can teach them. He once described himself as a "mammal patriot". He helped to make ecological awareness a pillar of Beat Generation consciousness as early as the Six Gallery reading in 1955, because the poem he chose to read was the powerful "Point Lobos: Animism".

I took a walk through Prospect Park today. These hilly acres in the middle of Brooklyn were designed to get you lost, with swerving paths that make you think you're walking in a definite direction as they subtly turn you back again until you pass the spot where you started and realize you've turned completely around. If you ever tried to walk Prospect Park without a map you know what I'm talking about. If you ever tried to walk Prospect Park with a map you probably know what I'm talking about too, because that map really isn't going to help. It's kinda like life, and there are plenty of ways to get lost outside of Brooklyn too, whether you carry a map or not.

At one point I found a good tree stump to sit on and spent a few moments in a reverie of end-of-year contemplation, or end-of-decade contemplation. We've lived through some tumultuous and exciting times. I began by thinking about the music, movies and books of the last ten years. I decided the 2010's were a good decade for music, and I resolved that the musical crown of the decade should go to five very original women singers who kept it real: Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. This decade sounded just fine.

Movies, though? I don't know. The best stuff was on TV. Breaking Bad, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Broad City, Black*ish. I can't really think of any movies I liked as much as several TV shows.

Books? I don't know. I felt more sense of a coherent collective global literary mission ten years ago, when litblogs were hot. I can name lots of amazing novels from the first ten years of the new millennium, but not as many from the second decade which ends in nine days. I bet the fault is my own; I didn't try as hard to love novels during the last few years as I did when I was blogging about books three or four times a week. I've been immersing myself in the 19th century — novels, histories, operas — and I have to admit that I haven't read much new stuff lately as I should. I'll try to do better in the next ten years.