NODding Out - Chapter 22

Shoes, Paul Taylor, Sidney Bechet... and genocide

Digitally Abused Church Panorama, Cabeceiras, Portugal. iPhone. © 2025 Samuel Claiborne

I LOVE misusing the panorama capabilities of the iPhone. Try twisting and turning the phone while shooting one; it’s great fun! It reminds me of when we used to use spoons and things to deliberately distort Polaroid SX-70 photos while they were in the process of developing.

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Well, yeah, this novel seems kinda prescient. No, things aren’t as bad as they are described in this chapter, yet, but they could go there.

I remember when Donald Trump mentioned that he might consider imprisoning US citizens in that torture prison in El Salvador, but “only the worst of the worst, the most violent”. Yeah, just like only the “worst of the worst” of undocumented people are being pulled off the streets by masked storm troopers and renditioned to black sites…

If the USA slips farther into fascism, I’m sure that peaceful demonstrators will eventually be rebranded as ‘terrorists’, and eventually met with live ammunition.

Even under Obama, peaceful Occupy protesters were met with rubber bullets to the head from close range. Obama, who’d arranged a ‘beer summit’ between one black professor and one white cop who’d falsely arrested him, said nary a peep about police-coordinated media blackouts (including illegal airspace restrictions), highly militarized police SWAT-style assaults, and the resulting brutalization of hundreds (thousands?) of people at Occupy sites around the country. Obama, Mr. Nobel Peace Prize (awarded for what, exactly, can anyone tell me?) was silent and complicit in all of this.

So much for the durability of my heroes.

Of course, Trump makes Obama’s feckless inaction look like a Sunday picnic by comparison.

Herr Trump suggested just the other day that six democratic lawmakers who made a video reminding the military that they can and must refuse illegal and unconstitutional orders, were actually six traitors who should be executed.

We’re not that far from the reality of this novel vis a vis a fascist United States - not with an unstable malignant narcissist who may want to take everyone and everything with him when he starts to lose power, as he appears to be.

But even without nuclear Armageddon, fascism can and very likely will happen here. And so, I don’t live ‘here’ anymore, I have decamped to Portugal instead, praying that fascism doesn’t rear it’s head here too (it’s certainly threatening to), and that by some miracle America backs away from it and civil war.

One reason I decided to self-publish NODding Out in serial form this year was that after over 7 long years of trying and failing to find an agent for such a long book written by a first-time author, the book suddenly felt so NOW that I felt I had to get it out there.

It was fitting more and more into the current zeitgeist, and after almost 150 rejections from American and UK agents, I decided that It was time to do it myself, although I really didn’t want to go this route. The reality of fascism gaining huge ground, the guardrails and rule of law dissolving, the pandemic, the conspiracy theories, it’s all in this book, written over 20 years ago.

So, I’m publishing it, but damn, I sure wish it didn’t feel so damn prescient…

In more pleasant news, I’ve been in Portugal for just over two weeks now, living on a quiet little square in a quiet little village, and for the first time, I just saw a shepherd lead her flock of sheep right through the square and down the incredibly beautiful country road that sits adjacent to the house I rent my apartment in. How can you not smile at that?

Life is slower here. And people are kinder - even to me, a foreigner. I’d seen this on my first trip to Portugal, and my feelings on the general decency and kindness of the Portuguese people have only been reinforced since I arrived back here to what I hope will be the last country I live in.

Want an example? My wife and I got a flat tire in driving rain 3 days ago. I can’t change a tire right now - I am still recovering from back surgery. So, as she was looking up the number for the insurance to get a tow (yes, ALL car insurance in this country comes with a tow to the garage of your choice and a lift home for you, no AAA needed), someone stopped to help. this was literally like 2 minutes after we stopped.

He said he was a mechanic. He also happened to speak good English because he’d lived in the UK for awhile. He pulled out our spare, only to find it way too low on air. He said “Give me a minute” and he drove to a nearby gas station and came back with it inflated. He then saw that the jack was broken, and he fixed it. He then removed the flat tire, replaced it, and then drove around the parking lot with my wife to make sure the car was OK (we’d slammed hard over a high curb she hadn’t seen in the rain).

While he was changing the tire, we talked about the standard of living. I marveled how much ‘cheaper’ Portugal is, something that it turns out rankles the Portuguese because their average monthly salary is around $1500 a month. I’ve since learned that this is a terrible faux pas. But he patiently explained all of this to me, the ostensibly rich American. Yet, after setting me straight, and making sure the car was OK, he absolutely flatly refused to take a single penny. He left with a friendly wave, after helping us in the rain for about 40 minutes.

But before he left, as we tried to ply him with cold hard Euros, he explained that this is simply what you do for other people. And I agree with this. But so many Americans don’t appear to think this way.

Another example of Portuguese kindness: a year ago, my wife broke an axle, and several cars stopped very quickly to help. One man stayed with her for two hours until the tow truck came. This is not unusual. In fact, it appears to be the norm.

I’m not idealizing these people. Of course there are thugs, rapists, and murderers. An American was stabbed to death in an altercation with a local in another part of Portugal just a couple of weeks ago. But Portugal is statistically one of the safest countries in Europe, despite its relative low standard of living. There just seems to be more humanity here.

And there is more community spirit. The beach at the local reservoir (yep, you can swim in reservoirs here, for better or worse - presumably worse unless you enjoy drinking urine and suntan oil) has an entire floating ‘village’ of blow up dragons and castles for kids to play in and swim around every summer, all paid for by the local government. There are cultural events like religious parades, concerts, festivals, all kinds of stuff, going on all the time here.

Sure, phones are putting walls between people here too, but not as much as in the US. You still see people eating a meal here at a restaurant with nary a phone in sight. There’s a lot of cultural and historical glue holding these people together. Maybe that’s one of the benefits of a relatively homogenous society versus a “melting pot”.

And maybe that means that not all of the anti-immigration sentiment here is racist. Some of it may be predicated upon trying to preserve a cultural identity. We see many countries, from Norway to Denmark to the UK dealing with this issue, and, yes, it’s the fascist racist right wing taking the lead on it wherever we look, but that does not mean it’s a totally illegitimate concern.

No, alarmists, large swathes of the UK are not, in fact, under Sharia law. But 50% of the Muslims polled in the UK think homosexuality should be illegal. Progressives in a town in Michigan zealously backed a Muslim city council slate, only to see Pride parades and flags banned once those council members took office (a court eventually overruled them).

You can democratically elect people in the name of diversity who are themselves against diversity, and democracy. This is one of the nuances that the left-wing denies, to the point that ‘Queers for Palestine’ can appear on banners and it’s not parody, except, ironies of ironies, it is, in fact parody, once you take into account what the average Palestinian in Gaza thinks of homosexuals (and women’s rights, for that matter).

We all too often project our values onto other cultures, pretending that they’ve all experienced the Enlightenment, are eagerly awaiting the arrival of democracy. And we actively look away from their horrors, or even justify them on post-modern '“we should not judge others as that’s cultural imperialism” grounds - to the point that at least one noted feminist actually insisted that it was cultural imperialism to object to female genital mutilation.

The idea, in this post-modern sodden goulash, is to insist that all cultures are equal. They’re not, and it is absurd reductionism to insist they are.

You can slice this a LOT of ways.

The American system has been based on a rapacious and insatiable form of capitalism that has destroyed many lives, and helped others. And our ‘culture’ put innocent Japanese people into concentration camps, beheaded opponents and held their heads high like Al Queda types, during our war with the Philippines, trained generations of south and central American troops how to torture, and how to use rape (especially of children in front of their parents) as torture, at the School of the Americas - paid for with your tax dollars.

We’ve also clearly bombed the shit out of a lot of people, and happily sold weapons to others who do the same.

But, we also, until Musk killed this recently, fed millions around the world, and helped fight malaria, Polio, AIDS, TB, and many other scourges.

Some things we don’t do: educate our men on the ‘proper’ way to beat their wives; dress children up in suicide vests and parade them around, encouraging them to kill themselves when they get older, so that they may kill others; when it’s proper (in fact, required) to kill their daughters in ‘honor’ killings (often the daughter’s ‘crime’ is that she was a victim of rape!); mutilate their daughters genitalia (I am also against male circumcision, and consider it mutilation as well, but it’s nowhere near as severe, and not done for the same odious purpose); why you should throw gay people off roofs and/or burn them alive.

You are free to judge Western culture all you want. For all of its evils, it appears to be neither as violent, nor as imperialistic as fundamentalist Islam.

But let’s face it: all fundamentalists, from Hindus and Buddhists, to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, are infected with the same self-righteous certainty that makes them all incredibly dangerous.

Life is fucking complex, and I’ve always been sort of heterodox in my thinking. Not to just be contrary, but because none of the lock-step, knee-jerk party lines have ever totally made sense to me. Too many contradictions, and too much deliberate removal of nuance - on the left and the right. And as Albert Maysles famously said, in my favorite quote of all time, and the tag line for my Substack: “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”

And if you don’t think this also happens on the left, where students try to get professors to lose their tenure merely because they are teaching ideas, concepts, and, yes, facts, that the students find ‘disturbing’, and where students actively shout down invited speakers at lectures, well, I have some excellent ocean frontage to sell you in Arizona, and a lovely bridge from Brooklyn that I’ll throw in for free.

But I digress! Back to the Portuguese, a much more culturally cohesive country, but one that can feel very parochial if you’re living in the boonies and not in a major city like Lisbon or Porto.

Will I ever integrate here in the hinterlands? Well, I’m not Catholic, and I’m not even European, and I’m probably far more liberal in my views on sex outside of marriage, abortion, gay rights, etc. than most of the people who live in this rural part of the country, and I will probably always think somewhat like an American. That said, Portugal is way more enlightened in how they treat things like opiate addiction than the US is. It’s quite liberal and live-and-let-live in some ways.

But in terms of integration, perhaps the language is the biggest stumbling block. Portuguese is a hard language! I’ve dabbled in all of the other Romance languages, and Mandarin, and others, and the only one I find harder than Portuguese among those I’ve played around with is Turkish.

Unlike the other Romance languages (but like English), Portuguese is a ‘stress-timed’ language, which means, among other things, that syllables, sometimes entire words, disappear from spoken Portuguese, swallowed up as words flow together seamlessly. So spoken Portuguese often bears little resemblance to written Portuguese.

Even people who’ve studied it for years have problems understanding the locals when they’re speaking at normal Portuguese conversational speed. In fact, a young salesman at a local electronics store told me that “half the Portuguese can’t read it, write, it, speak it, or understand it properly”.

Consequently, if even natives have issues, I don’t think I’ll ever speak like a native. But I sincerely hope that someday I’ll be able to have long and rich conversations with the locals in Portuguese, and speak to audiences in Portuguese if I ever have a band again, ever lecture again, ever read my work to an audience again.

I’m studying about 2 hours a day, but I’m still pretty helpless with the language. Pronunciation is mostly OK, but vocabulary and grammar (and pronunciation at conversational speed!) are gonna take awhile.

In the meantime, I’m gonna watch the sheep, eat the delicious cheese made from their milk, and thank the Gods and Goddesses that my dear cat Sarah and I made it here in one piece apiece.

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Chapter 22

Oh my God—little did I know what I was in for. The Shoe District was just that, a bloody district. It consisted of store after store after store, stretching for well over a mile on one of the larger commercial streets. In building after building, three floors of shoes: retail on the ground floors, wholesale upstairs. There were scores of stores dedicated just to sneakers—plastic ones, some with lights and springs in their soles, others that were so futuristic as to be downright Space 1999 silly. Followed by scores of other stores specializing in pumps: stiletto pumps, leather pumps, plastic pumps, one had only red pumps! These were interspersed in turn with vendors hawking hiking boots, cotton tai chi slippers, plastic sandals, huge Chaka Khan style platform boots, even more atrocious Bootsy Collins style Funkadelic/Parliament thirteen inch platforms in dayglo colors, fake tiger fur, incredibly convincing faux leather, cheesy vinyl and on and on it went.

I spent three days just checking out the women’s retail stores on ground level, since that’d been what his mom had sold in Long Island—I know, grasping at straws again, but what’re you gonna do?

Each night I’d limp back to the Hui district on sore feet and eat sweet rosewater-flavored soups, chunks of lamb basted in cumin and hot peppers, and odd pastries that sort of reminded me of the baklava back home on Atlantic Avenue in my old lost neighborhood of Cobble Hill. Man, it filled me with a bitter nostalgia for New York before the Bomb. But these delicacies, while familiar, were oddly otherworldly at the same time. All of the food was like that.

The Hui food, though it used lamb and honey and rosewater and even had sort of proto-pitas, and was tantalizingly almost familiar, was also downright alien—unlike any Arab or Chinese food I’d ever had. Xi’an had been the beginning of the Silk Road and the traders from the Middle East had created a game of culinary telephone where the food mutated up and down the line, and had cross-pollinated with the local cuisine at every stop.

And after dinner? Drink enough hi-powered baijiu rice liquor to lose my shyness and look at the dark-eyed Hui girls. I’d surreptitiously check them out while I ate in the crowded noisy joints. They looked Chinese, but not the Chinese I’d seen in New York. There was a fierce Mongolian look and also a slightly un-Asian hint of Arab in their faces. Being a mutt, I guess I’m attracted to other mutts, and that made me feel terribly guilty about Nina, and then angry, and then paranoid; a little Pavlovian cycle of thought patterns that seemed to circle endlessly. Better to ignore them, eat my spicy lamb, drink my baijiu, and stagger home to the fleabag.

Every day I weaved up and down the dark alleys, past the Great Mosque—probably one of the only places left in the world where you can still hear Muslim prayer going on loud, proud and unfettered—past the bare light bulbs over the vendors’ stalls, past women with scarves and hoods over their heads, and little boys and girls dressed immaculately in white. How did they keep their clothes so clean in this dirty, smoky place?

Yeah, you’re probably amazed—a mosque? Really? Bet you thought they were all gone. Some 400 million plus Muslims wiped out in a concerted orgy of ethnic cleansing by Russia, China, India, Israel, and NATO, and especially the US of A, millions of the rest forcibly converted. And you figured that was it, huh? No, there are still a lot; they’re just keeping a low profile.

Maybe you’re pissed at me saying that? I mean, of course, it didn’t start out as a concerted plan. It escalated from one action and reaction to another. But the truth is, it eventually became a global pogrom, enthusiastically spearheaded by America: Pell morphed from a failed businessman/con artist to Christian Avenger poster boy and became our bloodiest president ever.

I don’t care what you call it. When he unleashed The Hammer of the Lord, as he called our nuclear arsenal, it was the worst act of state-sponsored terrorism in history, surpassing Hitler, Mao, Stalin and all of the other brutes of all time put together.

For most Americans, maybe for you, it was a righteous, bloodless war. We spearheaded a global firestorm against over 400 million people, the vast majority of them innocents. But just like during both Gulf wars, almost all of the images of civilian casualties abroad were rigidly suppressed by our government, with the media in lock step. People around the world saw the incredible carnage the USA inflicted on men, women and especially children in Iraq in Gulf Wars 1 & 2—searing images of kids with their guts blown out, faces burned off, limbs shredded—yeah, people everywhere saw it, but not Americans.

Well this time, driven by rage over the Aegean Wind, the censorship was ten times worse. Domestic internet sites that dared to show any collateral damage were shut down seemingly overnight by the FBI. Foreign ones were filtered. Suddenly, you couldn’t find Al Jazeera’s website (until Qatar was nuked too, and then there was no more Al Jazeera). Email was filtered and any offending images were censored. For most Americans, the most horrific war in history was almost abstract: a war fought primarily against civilians that leveled hundreds of major cities, was rendered largely invisible by media sleight-of-hand.

Of course, the information was there to be found, if anyone wanted to take the time and the risks, but most people didn’t. Instead, they were complicit, we were complicit, averting our gaze and swallowing government platitudes whole. Martial music accompanied every sanitized broadcast, whether it was on Fox, CNN, NPR, or PBS. And all the broadcasts hyped that this was a War For Survival. This is not the time for ethical questions, the subtext warned: if you stop to think, you’ll die, so just nuke ’em.

Our invisible war was fought with fingers coolly pressing buttons that launched missiles, which annihilated millions on the other side of the globe, with nothing more than video-game footage of smart bombs on the evening news. Not a rumble, not a ripple, not a whiff of death and dismemberment here in America. Just contrails silently crisscrossing the prairie, the Indian Ocean, the Hindu Kush, the Sahara.

And after it was over, the US was still Number One, crouching atop a vast funeral pyre, yet full of self-righteous fundamentalist certitude. This was the new Manifest Destiny.

After a while, I couldn’t block it out or continue like everything was normal. I found myself digging through the transient underground sites that popped up for a day or two on the web, looking at photos of leveled cities and burned children. As a result, my nights were spent sweating and grinding my teeth while the suffering ran through my dreams like a newsreel. I could smell the flesh mortifying under the ruins. I could feel the radiation burns. Every night, when my conscious defenses were down, it all crept in: the cries of millions of newly-made ghosts, screaming in confusion, groundless, lost and in pain.

Of course I wasn’t the only one. There were plenty of others who shared my shame and horror at what America had done, justified by what my city had suffered. But we were a tiny minority. We were strangers in the New America. And like everyone else, we soon became complicit again, soon learned to keep our mouths shut. Martial law has a way of doing that. A few incidents where peaceful demonstrators — terrorists according to our new and improved media — were shot by the hundreds, have a way of doing that too.

In the flash of the Aegean Wind, my city as I knew it was gone. After two years of famine, pestilence and war, my America—this grand experiment ostensibly born of liberty, tolerance, and freedom of speech—was speedily replaced by a right-wing theocracy that brooked no interference, and took no prisoners. And you know what’s most odd about this stunning turn away from everything I believed America was? It slowly became normal. I stuck to my job, my family and friends and Nina, and tried to feel normal again. And one day I did. But it was illusory: neither I, nor my country, nor my world was ever gonna be normal again. Because then NOD came.

Come on, Andy, think about something else, something nice. Think about Nina: Nina dancing the lead in Esplanade at City Center, the crowd holding its breath as she skipped and jigged over a row of prone dancers, like a kid traipsing down a country lane; Nina, walking towards me through the slow blizzard of milkweed seeds flying all around us on a hot September day in the Berkshires; feeling her breathing slowing toward sleep like an ebbing tide as she lay next to me; teaching her to use chopsticks at the Nom-Wah Tea Room; listening to Sidney Bechet on a rainy Sunday, making love to his searching, yearning clarinet on Blue Horizon as God drummed along on the skylights.

Grinning. I remember that big grin of hers. And her liquid laugh, a laugh delighted at its own delight, like a mockingbird trilling all night for no good reason.

I remember all of it, and then I remember the rest. No. Think happy thoughts, Andy, don’t go there. Too late. Memory’s a bitch, and here I am trying to save it. For what? Wouldn’t I be better off forgetting, like she had?

Where the fuck was I? Oh yeah, America the beautiful, and the aftermath. The Chinese, like so many others, had taken their cue from us. The Hui and many other ethnic Muslims in China remained very, very quiet, and were largely spared. But the more militant Uyghurs in the western part of the country were wiped out in a matter of weeks while the world was preoccupied with the attempted germ attack on Washington and that sabotaged reactor melting down in Massachusetts.

And what of the Arabs in Detroit and Brooklyn and so many other places here in the US? Had they fared much better? Some weren’t even Muslim and some were third generation and as American as apple pie. That didn’t stop anyone from lynching them. Well, many of those in Brooklyn were killed outright in the Aegean Wind blast. But for those left, lynching and summary executions, some of mothers, pregnant women, children, were the order of the day. And woe be upon anyone who tried to stop it. They got lynched too. We all realized we no longer lived in a democracy. We all realized that we’d better not open our mouths, especially anyone who looked like a Muslim or an Arab.

Things have only calmed down, ironically, because of NOD. Maybe Veaux pulled some strings to end the war, to keep more storage capacity to steal, or maybe the economic damage caused by NOD deflated the war. Either way, war and terrorism have fallen to mass dementia and concomitant economic disruption, but not before over 40% of the Muslims on earth were murdered. Most of the rest were converted by force, or at best practice their beliefs in secret in most parts of the world. But not here in Xi’an; here they still flourish, albeit very politely and circumspectly, aware of the weight of the Han on their necks.

Here I was, savoring a backwater, mutated remnant of Muslim culture—one of the few left out in the open. Pell’s fucking war had seemed like the worst terrorism possible, until Veaux and company appeared on the scene. At this point NOD has probably already killed or vegetized larger numbers of innocents.

And even here in placid Xi’an, where the quiet, ethnically mixed Hui are left relatively unscathed by either war or NOD, people still seem preoccupied. The world is wrapped up in a sort of global Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. After all, NOD followed hard on the war’s heels, and I think everyone wonders if it’s some kind of divine retribution, and they’re looking over their shoulders, holding their collective breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.