Carl Weaver came up in Miami’s concrete sprawl, raised by a Viennese mother who painted in a cramped, solitary flat. His boyhood friends were petty criminals, their schemes a crude education. In high school, radical texts turned him toward Left Wing ideology, a fleeting rebellion. At Chicago, he buried himself in literature, history, and political philosophy, mastering three languages, and finishing with a thesis on Machiavelli’s Mandragola that he subsequently burned.
Swept up after 9/11 he joined the Army and served two tours with the 26th Infantry Regiment: the ‘hardest hit unit in Iraq.’ Summing up his wartime experience in a brief tv interview with the local news station upon his return from duty, he quoted D.H. Lawrence’s Classic American Literature: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
Now he sells old books in a dim shop back in Dade County, a gun tucked away for grim nights. He shares a worn apartment with three men, their talk sharp and aimless. At the moment Faulkner and Sterne lie next to his bed next to an 18th century edition of the Theological-Political Tractatus, their pages a mirror to his disabused enlightenment. In his writings for the SS African Mercury, his words press forward in burnished columns, the cold surface of what he sees as his perfect life.
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Dispatch from the Future Drone Wars | Reports, May 2025