1.
“We too are somehow impossible, formed of so many
Different things,
Too many to make sense to anybody.
We straggle on as quotients, hard-to-combine
Ingredients, and what continues
Does so with our participation and consent.”
—John Ashbery, “The Wrong Kind of Insurance”
I’ve been back in America for almost two years. Lana’s new album runs more and more late. This story doesn’t begin with Lana del Rey, or Joan Mitchell, or John Ashbery, or America though. It begins in Britain or the Channel Islands somewhere, in the afternoon their time, when a popular right-wing influencer who I’ll call Peony, sends me a DM. She is going to kill herself and blame it on me. Three days later or so, she threatens to sue me for libel in the UK. Lana’s new song about having 57.5 million listeners on Spotify is grating on in the background at the time, aptly preoccupied with the signifiers of social media success as stand-ins for work of substance.
I had recently posted several things contradicting quoted public tweets of Peony’s. I first articulated that it was anti-feminist to want to date a man who didn’t want you to vote (as she claimed to want). Second, I affirmed my own life had worth as a woman at the age of 38 (she had bragged about her status as an aspirational Lolita figure to her conservative male audience in her late 20s). Finally, Peony had posted a tweet seen by millions of people about how she wanted a “forbidden boyfriend”— like “on a watchlist”. DMs flood into the night; the man is called, I kid you not, “Raw Egg Nationalist,” the watchlist is maintained by Hope Not Hate, and he is basically a Dollar Store Mishima who believes in giving himself salmonella, bodybuilding, and restricting the rights of women, minorities and other figures who don’t appeal to his white nationalist agenda.
Peony also liked posting “thinspo”—a genre of images within which new Ozempic Lana was popular again, that glamorize eating disorders. She admires Mussolini. She wants to play the new Kayne “Heil Hitler” song at her hypothetical future wedding. She loves Lana too. You get the drift. Anyone would. It’s the drift of America, of the world.
In my YouTube window in the background, Lana moved on from the Spotify song in her Stagecoach set to singing Stand By Your Man to her new husband, an alligator guide Trump voter who makes transphobic Facebook comments.
The only man I’ll stand by, a 17 lb Maine Coon rescue mix cat (neutered), is sleeping on my desk, blissfully indifferent. More specifically, he’s sleeping on an oversize Joan Mitchell catalogue because I’m looking for the curl back from the McCarthyite 1950’s, the last time America felt most like this, in her quick, aggressive strokes, bold even in reproduction, defiant of feminine expectation in the postwar lull. In her Evenings on 73rd Street, an early work from 1957, you can see the quick, thick impasto-strokes of oil passion layer up, the sunset implicit in the fiery orange just glinting on the top of green, blue, and lead-white horizontal strokes in frantic New York street weave movement. Lead white is for the gaps between the buildings, for the building up of image as pure feeling, for wanting to be more than some man’s fantasy entrapped in a sundress, sheer as cheap acrylic paint. Joan Mitchell was a friend and collaborator to the poet and critic John Ashbery, himself also an avatar of a difficult America, a baroque turn of American speech that was out of its own time.
Today, America has made the global conservative pivot. It’s bad, and it’s currently on my laptop partly in the form of a manic, frivolous lawsuit being filed at me from across the Atlantic, partly in the form of other hard-to-combine-ingredients like the new Lana songs—it’s just in the air. Here’s the thing though: America in its small way, had also just saved me, straggled on as my quotient of what passes for small patriotism. This feels like Aaron Sorkiny-Hamilton-the-Musical-Dross, but it’s true, much to my chagrin to have to admit. The source of my leeway to speak freely, about Peony or anything else, stretches back to the Founding Fathers. In Federalist 84, Hamilton brings up the necessity of a Bill of Rights in the context of free speech. In 1789, James Madison speaks to House of Representatives, saying that:
The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.
This quote became the basis for the First Amendment. Fast forward to the third millenia: legal scholars and the US government began noticing a rise in something called libel tourism—when people sought to file libel claims against global journalists and authors in Britain even when the accused were not British, because British libel courts were so permissive, expensive, and put the burden of proof on the defendant. To even file there had a chilling effect on what people were willing to say and print everywhere, since those British judgments, by treaty, could then be enforced even in America on American citizens. This silencing by fear of suit is included in what Madison means by “deprived or abridged”—and why the American legal system, by contrast, specifically places a high burden on the accuser in libel and defamation, and provides ample Constitutional protections for what you are allowed to say in public in general.
There was also a simultaneous rise in frivolous libel suits in Britain being visited specifically on Americans, so New York State, acting in the interest of its many citizens who are also writers, passed a law against libel judgments in Britain being enforceable here in 2008. In 2013, remarkably, a bill called the SPEECH Act unanimously passed both houses of Congress and was signed by President Obama. Everyone basically agrees: you can no longer visit the judgments of a British libel court on Americans’ speech in America because it does not rise to the standard of First Amendment protections. The Founding Fathers would have hated that with a burning fire, the subjection of an American’s words in America to a foreign court (particularly a British one!) whose provision for speech is less robust than ours by far; you get to speak without fear of prison or court here, at least in theory.
So, basically: Peony can’t do anything about my speech, in print, online, or otherwise. I can’t get sued from Britain for calling adjacency to the new fascism exactly what it is because of James Madison, because of what became the First Amendment, because of a series of trials and legislative acts, that combined over time and circumstance, together produce the Republic’s ongoing participation and consent. I, the granddaughter of blacklisted communists, who is prohibited from saying many of the exact same things about Gaza on my own American soil, nonetheless, have been saved by the direct consequences of the idealism and Enlightenment pamphlet culture of the early American Republic, just this once. There’s a beautiful irony there. For perhaps the only time I’ll get, I’m John Hancocking it, “the great bulwarks of liberty” at my back like a thick impasto line. The impossible things that form me, form my America, become more somehow impossible.
And by the way: no one cares, Lana, how many listeners you have on Spotify. It’s a horrible chorus from someone famous for their lyricism. James Madison’s conception of the First Amendment protects me saying that too. Ashbery’s scorn also would, but that’s not legally enforceable.
To quote Joan Mitchell mentoring the young painter Joyce Pensato:
“Put your feelings in there, don’t just paint some shit, like you don’t care.”
I care. Reading the Federalist Papers late into the night, I start to believe it might be an intrinsic American factor to care, or something that was woven into this nation even from its blighted start, a rare moment of impassioned idealism for a thing better than it could ever come to be.
II.
My grandfather also cared, embodying this American idealist streak on the left. He was a Communist who served in the Second World War at a base in Texas, because they were apparently too scared to send commies to the front. After the war, when asked to take a McCarthyite loyalty oath to enter the Florida bar, he refused, meaning he was unable to practice law and in considerable trouble. His brothers all fled, as they would have either been forced to testify against him or been held in contempt. He personally went down to Miami, Florida, where I grew up, to lay low and sell vacuums for over a decade because apparently the man who ran the local Electrolux branch was a comrade. His principles cost him everything. My mother, and now my sister, remain experts on vacuums to this day.
When the libel threats were posted, when the suicide-blackmail came, I remembered this.
The cronies of the right had systematically destroyed a generation of my family, had stripped the rights from my body as a woman and a queer person, and had destroyed the lives of my trans friends. They had arrested people of conscience I knew and loved protesting against genocide. I wasn’t also going to give this woman, who had amply profited off of being an alt-right figure online, license to destroy my life too. When you threaten to blackmail someone with suicide, that’s what you’re doing. It is after all Justice Louis Brandeis who popularized saying “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—so I went public, fast.
Had Peony been a victim of abuse? Probably, it seems so, though there are so many layers of lies online I can’t tell what’s true about this woman anymore. Did it give her the right to visit that abuse on me? No, it did not.
I wasn’t the first – several DMs from victims before me surfaced. I called police in three international jurisdictions at 3 AM Eastern Daylight Time so she couldn’t take her own life. Then, screenshotting the document where she also repeatedly called me a bitch and a freak in addition to the suicide threat, I hit “post.” Her followers brigaded my account. I was an “unfuckable lesbian dead end”. I was every form of slur, including “ghey”— likely spelled that way to reference the stabbing murder of Brianna Ghey, a British teenage trans girl.
It says a lot about you, the way the people you call friends talk.
Lana, in a show leading up to the album release, confesses to kissing Morgan Wallen on an ATV. Morgan Wallen is a country singer who used a racial slur in 2021 for black people such that he was cancelled by major radio stations, his own record label, and the country music awards circuit. Mentioning him was certainly a choice, in 2025, on a stage that looked like a Plantation House with black backup singers as the “help.”
Joan Mitchell, though originally a WASP from a wealthy family, did screenprints for an edition of John Ashbery’s poems, now held in collections including MoMA. Ashbery was an out queer man in the 1960’s. This choice of friends here was also political. The cover of the 1960 Tiber Press edition, published here in New York, has a red square where the stars of the American flag would be, and the rectangular rough outline of it, rendered in haywire thick strokes of expressionist black. I feel the black coming down now on America, the blood red again in the field of stars. How long until gay marriage is illegal again? How many more atrocities in our names can we count?
I hate imperialism. I’m not in any typical way a patriot. I want to love the idealism of the small moment in which America stands for something I believe. But I don’t know how yet, even pace Madison, and this new album of Lana’s not helping either. I used to see her as someone who I could negotiate an American aesthetic through. Now I see her as someone who wants to erase people like me from it. Woody Guthrie’s guitar famously read “this machine kills fascists.” Lana’s might as well say “this machine appears frequently in fascists’ Instagram posts.”
I think it’s choosing time.
Which side are you on? / Which side are you on? —Pete Seeger
III.
Will you still love me when I’m not young and beautiful? —Lana Del Rey
Several days later, I unlock my account and the torrent of abuse seems to be lightening. It’s a lot of women who also post images of Lana who attack me, the ones who can’t stand that I exist. They all slur my age too— which is funny because I am, at 38, several years younger than Lana herself. The thing with the girlblogger-Riefenstahl set is that they’re all terrified of getting older because unlike Riefenstahl, or Lana, or Mishima, or any artist, regardless of political reprehensibility, they haven’t actually made anything that will last, and seem to have no plans to. They wish they could have the weight of a Riefenstahl, be worth the time of a Susan Sontag post-facto. Posing as a writer, artist, or intellectual is easy in photoshoots but hard to actually do in real life.
They enjoy saying I’m ugly, but at the same time they seem to have forgotten what even Lana has not: et in arcadia ego.
Peony’s content, and her followers, tried to create a world where that was true, where you age out of worth as a woman. They threw themselves on their own pyre—but I refuse to; I refuse the world that measures me, or anyone else, this way. At this point, Peony claimed she was going to file the frivolous libel suit that opened this essay. Incidentally, the words Madison used before the House of Representatives in 1789, and that eventually became the model for the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, were written when he was 38. In There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard, also published at age 38, Lana seemed to believe in her worth too, lasting. In the Gator Man Tradwife Era, I’m not so sure.
“I apologize in advance for what they’ll say about the lines on your face
They’re a road map of your lovely life
Hope they extend you a little grace
The grace you’ve extended me knowing things
The grace no one gave you all of your life”
—Lana Del Rey, Husband of Mine
She’s complaining here about the mass perception of Gator Man as a conservative Trump voter, which by all accounts he is. Is a duck not a duck? I don’t care about the lines on his face.
I am no Christian. My grace is not infinite. I am done affording grace to the shepherds of hate. I am done trying to make an America that concords with Lana’s, and however much I still admire her as a songwriter, she has become painful to listen to, a symbol of the shift rightward. By the way, Which Side Are You On, though it has become a traditional labor and leftist anthem, was actually written by a miner’s wife named Florence Reece in the 1930’s. It refers to the Harlan County strike in East Kentucky. These lines speak to the situation specifically:
If you go to Harlan County
There is no neutral there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair
There is no neutral there. Or here either anymore, in this America, linked by glinting cables and wires, scrolling on screens brighter than lead white. J.H. Blair was the Sheriff in Harlan during the strikes. He waited outside Florence Reece’s home with a gun to shoot her husband when he came home. That’s part of why she wrote the song. Right now, ICE is specifically targeting union organizers amongst farm workers to illegally kidnap and rendition to a torture prison in El Salvador. What’s old is new again. I wonder if Lana would be content with being a thug for J.H. Blair, I wonder how many Americans would. For every rare moment of sparkling discourse about the nature of free dissent, we have ten masked thugs dragging graduate students and husbands and wives and lovers and workers off the street. The ratio isn’t good.
I see a Joan Mitchell in person at the Whitney with my students this term. It’s called Hemlock, not for John Ashbery, but for Wallace Stevens this time. Mitchell knew poets her whole life, painted with poetry. The lines that inspired this painting, from “Domination of Black,” read:
“Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the
heavy hemlocks…”
You could roll your body along the length of this painting about three times, it’s that big. And the dark black-green of the hemlocks protrudes out of the white ground, both by sight and visual hapsis, again thick impasto. In this moment to me it feels more like kudzu, like it’s choking out the light, spreading intrusive, cloaking, and fast across the American south that Lana now supposedly claims. Hemlock, of course, is Death-of-Socrates-infamous for being poisonous.
Do these women who brag about their faces on the internet, who make them their only asset, not see? Do they not see the night coming, choking them out with the politics of their own cruelty? I feel like I see all the portents, all the planets gathering in the skies above America and can do nothing but watch the dark fall, a screaming Cassandra in caps lock, all posts and emails and temporary modes of letters.
The other obvious response here is that all flesh is grass. It is ironic that this is a rejoinder to people who mostly pose as traditionalist Catholics, but it is, ashes to ashes. What survives us, our bad Americas, our timeliness, is only the art we can make, and none of these people have so far made any worthwhile art. Joan Mitchell hemlocks up the wall of the Whitney, John Ashbery lives in the infamous marbled-paper edition on my bedside table. Call me an “unfuckable lesbian dead end”, mock my countenance or my being, but when I am long riddled with worms the Library of Congress still has it forever:
NX643 .M38 2023
My own book, nestled into the bosom of the American capitol, in perpetuity. A council of cretins doesn’t even have to rule on my worth by fuckablity. Thanks, America.
Lana’s there too, by the way, and Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie are in the Smithsonian’s American Folkways collection. We’re all in the Carnegie Libraries and the public branches that still dot this country, cut to bone though they are. I think of the Monuments Men, tasked by the US Army with rescuing art from the invading Nazis in Europe, saving the Ghent Altarpiece. It’s not that art isn’t ever fascist, or will save us from fascism, but that occasionally, in the right hands, it can outlast it, be there when the dark fog lifts, when you’re neither young nor beautiful nor even necessarily breathing. I hope this essay outlasts me, outlasts all of us. That’s what we always hope for in the end, when we publish our sentiments, to steal Madison’s words, which in outliving him, became the implicit national undergirding for mine.
Ashbery, from “We Hesitate”:
“The days to come are a watershed.
You have to improve your portrait of God
To make it plain. It is on the list,
You and your bodies are on the line….”
IV.
“Our lives shall not be sweetened
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses”
—traditional labor anthem, Bread and Roses
The days to come are a watershed. It wasn’t anything like the Lana I grew up listening to sitting in my mother’s Volvo–my mother, the communist’s daughter, and I the pink-diaper baby to her red. I heard Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie yes, but also Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Judy Collins. Joni Mitchell sings she is a “lonely painter/who lives in a box of paints” which made me confuse her with Joan Mitchell well into adolescence. Joan Mitchell paints sort-of-landscapes, abstractions which are first inspired by America, and later in her life, France. This is why I was initially befuddled by a work named Minnesota, thought it was all Provencal yellow light and countryside, since it hangs in the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Mitchell was asked about this painting—it was inspired by the Great Lakes, the confoundingly large prairies of Middle America. It was made in 1980, but presages her late period, the vibrant yellow of harvest wheat in the sun. There is this too, in the plain portrait of America somewhere, waiting to be recovered.
One of the Monuments Men, Lincoln Kirstein, later helped George Balanchine co-found the New York City Ballet. Real ballet, with its immigrants, exiles, Jews, and radicals, seems to scare the new Alt Right that simultaneously tries to wear “balletcore” pink and bows to buttress a childish, agentless femininity. Peony, trying desperately to claw at me after her suit never even reaches court, tweets about the “disgusting” feet of ballet dancers appalling her by comparison at her pedicure. It’s true, pointe shoes give you calluses. But I love mine; they are another art, another tradition in America borne by my body itself, that the new fascism cannot reach just yet. The training I have in the modern hybrid American ballet tradition, the way I raise my arms in first and fifth—these are still untainted, the point where the radiant almost-neon yellow of the field hits Mitchell’s signature white ground.
You mark your right and left shoe before you sew them. My right pointe shoe has a rose, the left, a loaf of bread. This is a tribute to the Judy Collins version of the socialist anthem Bread and Roses, that I often heard growing up. We fight for bread, she sings, the basic rights and wages of workers as human beings and citizens—but we also fight for roses, the right to art and beauty as essential human rights too. I imagine Joan Mitchell’s Minnesota, the wheat ground in mills, and stored in high silos. I dream of a Bread and Roses America, one where I hear Judy’s voice before Lana’s now, a shift in the national tone.
Five miners died in Harlan Country during the strikes. The police were beating protesting students at Columbia’s library a few nights ago. Tonight it’s Brooklyn College. That’s what they say to each other with this, the fascists in power, that James Madison’s an unfuckable dead end, that they do not care about our participation and consent, our bulwarks of liberty.
They talk about suspending Habeas Corpus, but it’s “All Quiet In The South” on Lana’s new album. Sigh.
Maybe not. Change the station:
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it,
soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been gone long ago
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?”
—Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,Ohio
V.
This is where abstraction fails. Where you hit a wall. The person dead on the ground in the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song was a real man, in a real—and now famous– photograph. His name was Jeffrey Miller, and he was a 20 year old Jewish Kent State student killed for organizing against the war in Cambodia by the Ohio National Guard. What’s old is new again, America, same story. Except this time I sometimes know the person in the photos and it’s not a history textbook. Except the government is now taking the photos like this one out of the history textbooks in America. Except over on my spattered laptop screen windowed in the night, there’s Lana, on an antebellum porch with twinkling lights, singing the nostalgia line, like none of it ever happened anyway.
The date comes and passes when any libel suit would be filed and it isn’t, of course, Peony just wanted to scare me into silence. She also really wants you to know she’s not Jewish like Jeffrey Miller—she posts about it, playing coy with white supremacist ideals. Her constant projection of vulnerability, and claims that this is all somehow irony when called out, are also common tactics for women associated with the fringe right wing. It’s as if the spectres of victimhood or deniability excuse the footsie with fascism for substantial Substack revenue under the internet table. In the end though, the grift, the blackmail suicide gambit, and the libel threat, didn’t work; the posts with her full name remain online so that the next time she tries this, people know who she really is. I’ve played the John Hancock Uno-reverse card this time. If I can write this under my real name, she can cuddle up to the alt right under hers. I don’t use it here so she can’t profit further because of this essay. She’ll hate that, when I lay plain the grift and attach her to it, but deprive her of the outrage mileage she’d get otherwise. Peony is British, but grift is also an old American tradition. If you believe her the next time she tries this, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
At the end of the music video for “Ride” Lana, Brooklyn Baby Lana, Hollywood Lana, pastiche of all the Lanas, says in a voiceover:
I believe in the country America used to be.
So here’s my voiceover:
Is that My Lai, Native American genocide, Jim Crow segregation, Abu Ghraib, Jeffrey Miller dead on the ground in the foreground of a photograph with a fourteen year old girl screaming America?
No thanks.
In 1968, Joan Mitchell moved to France. Unlike many American artists of the period who were outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War, all I can find from her is silence. Her work may have been formally radical, but she wasn’t.
Ashbery wrote a book of poems called The Tennis Court Oath during McCarthy’s Lavendar Scare, in parallel with the Red Scare. The book is named for the famous incident during the French Revolution, and is often seen as his most openly political. Still, in Self Portrait in a Complex Mirror (1975) he publishes the following in a poem called “The One Thing That Can Save America” :
… It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
All the rest is waiting
For a letter that never arrives,
Day after day, the exasperation
Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago.
Its truth is timeless, but its time has still
Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited
Steps that can be taken against danger
Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
So can America be saved? Yes. No. Maybe, in some timeless secret way predating the possibility of 57.5 million people listening to anything, predating the expressionist brushstroke exploding onto the canvas, predating by far the alt right to fascism pipeline that runs like an interstate or an irrigation canal crosswise through the field of the internet. In the quiet small apartment I live in in Brooklyn, I try to take steps against danger. I try to hold the envelope with the answer to the light, to read the back of the letter. I want to steam it open with a kettle when no one’s looking.
Once again, I am 38 years old, the age when James Madison first gave the speech that became the First Amendment. I find it hard to listen to Lana anymore. I want to write like Joan Mitchell paints, all emotion embodied, but I can’t—and won’t—walk away from my political commitments, either. I am 38 years old, unashamed of having lived, and still American. Theoretically, the Lynx, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor are all visible from New York right now. It’s foggy and I can’t see any of them in a night like hemlock. Much less can I judge if they render us exemplary. I extend no additional grace. I stand by no man. I’ve been back in America for two years; there is no neutral here, only lumps and trials.
A.V. Marraccini
A.V. Marraccini is an American, writing from America.