Letter to Allen on the State of the State, March 2026

Ah Allen, your centennial is coming up and the world keeps moving.

Sometimes it moves forward, but it’s often difficult to tell—amid

the zigzags and the circling back, bloody oil spills and ICE-y shotgun

blasts, robot drones with robot handlers dropping big dumb bombs

on countries most Americans couldn’t find on a map. Allen, did you

imagine that Americans would ever elect as corrupt and divisive

a president as Donald Trump, our only president previously convicted

of multiple felonies, a climate-change denier found liable in court for

sexual abuse, accused of a range of sexual assaults, including rape,

by over two dozen women? A president who calls himself smart

while his former Penn professor William Kelly calls Trump the dumbest

goddamn student he ever had? Perhaps Trump’s only decent campaign

promise was a vow to avoid new mid-East wars and now, after a

U.S.-supported Gaza genocide, we’re in the midst of an unwarranted and

illegal U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, already with over 2,000 civilians killed

in the first few weeks, including a girls’ school massacre, and attacks

on oil depots that have led to poison rain splashing on a city of 9 million

with little room to run. No matter how many times a U.S. president asserts

that midnight murder of civilians by stealth bombers is legal under international

law, I still haven’t seen the permission clause for the long-distance killing

of children written up in the U.N. Charter or Universal Declaration of

Human Rights. Allen, do you have any new ideas on how to stop all this?

As planetary storms and floods grow worse year after year, Trump does all

he can to remove already-weak regulations meant to slow climate change.

Allen, people often ask me what you would say if you were still here

with us. My answer always the same—I don’t think it would be fair

to pretend an ability to speak for the dead, even a one-time teacher

and longtime friend, that all we can do with our influences is try

our imperfect best to help carry on their legacies. But, Allen, if the dead

can ever communicate with the living, can you figure out a way one

of these nights to write out a few strategy suggestions in my night-table

notebook for moving this planet on a more just and ecological road?

With continual wars across the planet, rock-stubborn ethnic oppression,

un-erased hunger and homelessness, literal and metaphorical tornados,

fanatical right-wing groups rambling across the real and radio dial,

one would think more voters and reporters would be singing out

for a more progressive course. Allen, when you were writing “Howl”

in the mid-1950s, did you believe things would dramatically improve

deeper into the 21^st century? Or that Moloch-like greed and mean-spiritedness

might even wipe us out long before now? So soon after the Holocaust

and during McCarthyism, where did you find the hopefulness to stare

into a wide range of human eyes and declare: “holy the supernatural

extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul.” Do you think, later in

this 21st century, activists will figure out new ways to pressure elected

officials to transform at least a little more of our soul’s intelligent

kindness into existence?