Mona, a girl who shoulda gotten an A, at C

Chinua Achebe declined to write stories based on his decades in the West. Westerners already had enough storytellers, he said. He insisted on focusing not just on what he knew, but on what he knew had gone untold.

“Mona At Sea” is one of the stories Achebe had in mind. Another rich college girl is having her quarter-life crisis, and we get to read about it. Cool.

But why wouldn’t we? Who reads? Who writes? Why must the corpus of torrid, gutwrenchingly dysfunctional sexual affairs always chronicle the troubles of tweedy nerds strolling the ivied halls for intellectually curious mentees living in their sexual prime? Are humanities dorks leering across the veal pen at the young things the only ones seeking and achieving such rejuvenation? Do petroleum engineers and bus drivers and public benefits claimants who mostly hang out in the neighborhood playing video games and doing some light babysitting also have affairs? Of course. What they don’t do is write. When they do write, they probably have more interesting stories to commit to paper anyway.

That’s how we get Franzen. “Ugh, he’s the person everyone wishes had died instead of David Foster Wallace.” I haven’t fictionalized the Cousin Gigolo story. “Romans-a-clef are lazy and dishonorable. They’re cheap shortcuts.” Who gives a shit? I’m too busy with nonfiction; that’s all. I don’t give a shit about the high ethics of this craft, and neither did the ancients, they of the classics. This is modernist nerd shit, the stuff of bored Victorian scolds. Vicky didn’t bang after Al died of shitwater, but the rest of them sure did. Oh, Archbishop. Fancy seeing you in the hallway this evening. Yes, I suppose I should give the Earl’s wife a rest, perhaps have a gin and tonic while she recovers.

No, I’m not planning to do the reading. It’s okay. The reviewer don’t always do the reading, either. “Mona at Sea” is of a canon many of us already know. Why else would it get dedicated segments on NPR? There is, to the best of my knowledge, no rude ditty by the title of “Bang, bang, Lourdes.” She’s forsaking her Christian name on a national news broadcast, hon. What’s going on here, hon. Sure, a girl might not have had legs for days in decades if you hire her in Lexington Market, but at least she won’t try NLP bullshit on you, hon.

Ah, an overachiever wannabe girlboss who acts like she knows what she wants in a career suddenly can’t have one because there’s no economy and we’re all idiotic enough to imagine Mocha Haole will fix it, and now she’s Online and frustrated. Gotcha. There’s a swollen population of unemployed young people with college degrees and mood disorders, and this style of literature is proliferating. Tell me something I don’t know, or don’t. We get the literature we buy. We get the literature we deserve. Something like that. Hell if I know. The parents want to know why their adult kids are so fucked up, too.

I described Mona as a rich girl, but I should specify. She isn’t hang out around the family compound doing this and that and go WASP diffident on anyone who disses her for it rich. She’s rich enough to have a reserved spot in her childhood bedroom. As Charles Carreon carried on, you don’t mess with the man from Tucson. Apparently you do mess with the woman from Tucson, if she isn’t the one suing the Ashland city government for booting her personal blog full of photoshopped pictures of Kathleen Parker sucking George W. Bush’s cock from the fiber network. We might say Mona is the real deepfake here. She’s the one who considers it her due to be living independently in New York and slaying in finance. That’s why it’s so humiliating for her to have her cheese moved on arrival in Manhattan and have to move back home to the provinces. Nothing happens in Tucson.

She isn’t exactly rich, then. She’s merely affluent. She’s mere upper-middle, not upper. A rich girl in her spot would be living in a nice apartment in a nice–maybe even up-and-coming!–neighborhood in New York on her parents’ dime and working, perhaps, in a job her parents bought for her. Or she’d be in the guest house, or hanging around the family camp up north, something of that nature. If she were old money–real money–she wouldn’t be distraught about any of that shit. She’d be like, eh, job market looks shitty and I’m bored, wanna go sailing?

Fuckups from truly rich families aren’t the ones who get hot and bothered about being failures. They have to have serious psychological difficulties or come from truly toxic families to end up like Mona. That shit’s for their subalterns, the strivers always serving them and so rarely managing to join their ranks, neurotics who are never satisfied that they’ve arrived even when they have. And yeah, some of it is just a #mindset; I’ve known people who prove it; but the hard cases skew upper middle, and they skew hard. They start showing up in families that are barely too poor to have anyone living comfortably off the portfolio yields. Just as importantly, though, they quickly vanish as the graph moves left into the fat middle, past the threshold where the only way to get a stockbroker is through one’s parents, as a legacy client. Whaddup homies.

Characters like Mona aren’t necessarily stereotypes, but they are inevitably archetypes. They have to fit into a narrow mold.

This may be TMI, and not just salaciously, but it’s worth sketching out the archetype in graphic detail. These are very specific characters. They’re specific because they’re crafted to appeal to a very specific audience with specific neuroses and terrors and NPR affiliate memberships.

They are not ones to imagine no more reading, especially after they semivoluntarily go hikikomori and have the time to read. All the fucking time in the world; grab your glasses, Bemis. We might say that our old boy Chapman “hit the mark,” in the University of Hawaii Library and again in Manhattan. We whacked da limey, yeah? We just couldn’t figure out how to do the reading aloha-like. Dat’s da problematic kine, da kine ya write down, da kine da haole teach to teach da bible to da local kine.

What girls like Mona never expect to be able to do is the fun reading. They have the glasses–eh, the contacts–but they don’t have the time. All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl indeed.

But she can’t be dull. She needs to be sharp. She’ll fall through the cracks if she loses her edge. She’ll be ruined. At all times she needs to be on point. I’m Tom Assbrush.

That’s something else. It do not be nearly enough like that, as they say online, problematically. For these cases as much as any, college is not libertine. It is not Rabelaisian or Bohemian or in any other way relaxed. It could be a place of sexual fluidity and discovery, chaotic and messy but stabilized by a highly functioning community. For some students it is. For students like Mona, it’s nothing of the sort. It isn’t even a catalytic environment of any sort. Cast aside all sexual and matchmaking functions, and it’s still a spiritual and intellectual wasteland. Striver kids like Mona aren’t there to make friends, as television teaches us to be our reality, or to learn to think. They’re there to learn how to make money. Mona’s attempt to break straight into high finance in a center of the global financial system is the key point here. I knew enough business majors to know this. Marketing and communications majors are just as shallow, and also dumber.

We can easily pigeonhole Mona’s psychological type. She’s a Type A who bottles her feelings up until the dam bursts and they spill where they will. In her case, they flood out in dramatically, in full public view. A review on GoodReads mentions a drinking problem. Color me shocked, Kwesi. If you’ve been around elite college kids, you’ll recognize the unacknowledged, unconfronted dysregulation. You’ll recognize the unmentionable, haphazardly treated mental health, behavioral health, and substance abuse problems. This shit’s classic.

We’re dealing with people whose attitudes towards the human body and mind are truly deranged. They verge, quite crassly, on gnosticism, the body being filthy and in need of subjugation, and since we’re on the subject the mind as well. lt’s a fascist mindset, albeit one focused on mental rather than physical athletics. These are intensely intimidated young people, adult dependents whose parents pay for them to be hazed for four years in the hope that the kids will graduate into a career track where they get paid to complete additional hazing rituals until their pledgmasters are satisfied or just bored. One of the precipitating events turning Mona’s life into a crisis after graduation is her suddenly being denied her due opportunity to prove herself in a paid hazing program.

It’s Parris Island for con artists. The job she was offered and then denied because the employer offering it abruptly closed was of the sort that never has professional qualifications. It isn’t dentistry or the law. She’d need more professional training to be a CNA or a hairdresser.

The big firms could hire whizzes straight off the street to work their portfolios if they wanted. They choose to hire hungry kids fresh out of college. It’s about class perpetuation as much as business. I could figure out market analysis pretty quickly. I know quite a bit about commodities and some types of stocks. I know a lot about the operations and markets of a variety of companies.

What I’m not about to do is live like a goddamn crackhead. That’s the problem. I’d leave for lunch and keep walking. They hire kids who’d sooner commit suicide or defenestrate in an amphetamine fugue. I’d answer my cell and tell them the report’s their problem now. The hustlers they hire will never let go of their sense of duty. Duty to what? They don’t care. They’ll never care. It doesn’t occur to them that maybe the analysis of brain-fried 25-year-olds shouldn’t be a critical factor in a $10m short of the Brazilian corn market or whatever the hell they think makes sense as an economy.

These kids have to conform to a very specific, very narrow type. If they deviate they won’t get hired. Maybe if they’re honest-to-God whizzes they would, or if they know people, or if they’re charming enough to compensate, but it’s striking how many of them are slender, often to the point of looking like they have eating disorders. They’re all on drugs, of course. They’re obsequious neurotics who miscalibrate their speedballs and fly off the handle. After hours they’re absolute wrecks.

They’re trained for this shit starting in high school, if not preschool. They need perfect GPA’s. They need extracurriculars. They need compelling personal narratives. There’s no time to slack off, to be children, to be adolescents. They’ll be ruined if they try.

This is why they converge on the same eerily sick physical and psychological profile. The ladies have to be slim. The gents have the latitude to be buff, but not generally husky. The bosses would rather not have anyone, of either or any sex, looking like a roustabout who pulls crab pots all day and eats like a longshoreman. The idea is that these eager young things can find the money for dentists, dermatologists, gym memberships, dietary supplements, and whatever else they need to look great when they eat and live for shit.

The college girl who’s going places needs to be daintily pushy. She doesn’t have to smell clean as an escort, but she needs to smell good, and under no circumstances ethnic or poor. Liquor breath or a postgame sheen are fine. Smelling like months of Top Ramen, cigarettes, and hidden corners of weekly motel rooms is not. She needs just enough time to go to the bathroom, but not a minute more, unless it’s to break down in tears over shit a reasonable, assertive person wouldn’t tolerate in the first place. Her stools can look as awful as her gut feels, but she can’t have gas that won’t wait for a toilet.

She should sexualize herself for the gratification of her bosses, but not do anything coarsely womanly like mention her period or accidentally show it. It’s probably no accident that there’s been so much overwrought discourse about menstruation in middle-highbrow circles recently. Like any other bodily fluid or gas, menstrual blood is more noticeable on a white-collar clean freak than on a woman who’s been mucking livestock stalls. Oh, did I bleed through my pants? I’ll keep that in mind when I hose off the pigshit. Fewer and fewer affluent Americans under thirty have ever changed a baby’s diaper.

There’s a very real, very bad trend back towards companies asserting ownership of their employees’ bodies. Amazon basically won’t allow its employees bathroom breaks. Jim Beam asked its employees to report their periods to help it monitor time theft in the bathrooms. It’s been harder and harder to find public restrooms over the past few decades, a situation that suddenly got much worse with the Covid-19 shutdowns. Thankfully, this much is finally starting to reverse in earnest. On the other hand, public schools have been forcing this extreme bodily discipline on their students for centuries. This applies in Britain, too. *Under the Eton Privy voice* There may not be a bottom below, chap, but there’s always a bottom above!

Despite their obnoxiousness and intermittent misandry, feminist loudmouths have a point about the objecification and possession of women’s bodies. The Dallas Cowboys got into trouble for bullying and demeaning their cheerleaders–who are obscenely underpaid, by the way–with lectures about things like portion control at meals and how often they should change their tampons. These assholes hired women to be crack performative athletes, and they act like they’ve made it into their twenties unable to properly attend to their own personal hygiene. The problems here go beyond bad bosses. We shouldn’t have people who think like that in positions of power, period.

Heh. Look on the bright side, though. *Yogi Berra Patriotism Voice* Only in America can a fat Jewish truck stop hooker from Salt Lake City sing the National Anthem in a Major League ballpark.

It’s extremely neoliberal idpol to focus on menstruation as a burden in a society with pervasive, extreme fatigue and mental illness. How much of the problem is premenstrual or menstrual pain, and how much of it is delirious fatigue and Ford Stomach in inexcusably harsh academic and corporate environments?

On second thot, tho, that’s more a faildaughter vealpen thing than a girlboss thing. The Business Success Girls (and Guys!) are too busy climbing the greasy pole to give much mind to any of that. For the failspawn, it’s a transference of serious failures of neoliberal Western society onto sexualized grievances conferring extra idpol points. On the serious career track, it’s an unacceptable admission of weakness. A woman can’t admit to being tired for any other reason, either.

This shit might be excusable if it were ordered towards motherhood. Raising children is exhausting, and childrearing duties usually get dumped on women. If my ex is reading this, I’m eager to do my part to change this again, but for real, raising kids is no joke, especially for anyone trying to equal her as a mother. The thing is, if aggro college girls were trying to train for motherhood, they’d have kids already. They wouldn’t be waiting until their mid-thirties to fob one or two brats onto a Guatemalan nanny so they can go back to Goldman Sachs two months postpartum to express breast milk in a special stall.

We’re just about back to wet nurses in this country. You and me, baby, unfortunately, ain’t nothing but mammals.

This whole system is obviously broken. The writing about the corporate agenda for the white-collar workforce was on the wall by the time Clinton was elected; for the blue-collar workforce, Reagan wrote it in boldface starting on day one. The bosses kept throwing enough scraps into the pit to keep the office drones mostly in line until the 2008 crash. They spent the next decade and change fucking around and kinda sorta finding out. Then the Rona hit. They inside-traded the shit out of the pandemic and the restrictions it triggered, and they’ve pretty successfully turned public opinion against laid-off service workers who want to stay on unemployment benefits, but they’ve blown it with their cube monkeys. No one wants to come back to the office. Employers are facing mass resignations for forcing employees to return to the office full-time.

Good.

This is the arrangement Elizabeth Gonzalez James has Mona begging to join. It’s garbage, but college trained us to chase garbage. Those of us who refuse suffer for our refusal. Those who comply suffer in different ways. Most of this suffering is needless. It’s destructive and parasitic. Everybody’s just trying to justify taking a bigger slice of a possibly growing but also possibly shrinking pie. That’s all high finance is.

Occupy Wall Street comes in for criticism, rightly enough, for being the sour grapes of young people who would have demanded their own jobs on Wall Street if they’d discerned a chance in hell of being chosen from the midst of the scrum. From the perspective of figuring out who the hell is actually trying to run this joint instead of looting it, critics like Partial Objects were right. From the perspective of what the graduating classes of, say, 2007 onward were promised and not delivered, desperate strivers like Mona are entirely in the right. What kind of whipped little bitch would allow moneyed authority figures to promise and then revoke opportunities to make a killing busting ass for the machine, instead plunging the educated young into unemployment, underemployment, even precarity, even poverty? Surely that demands loud, explicit pushback.

That’s no time to let Larry Summers off the hook. His ilk should reap what they sowed. They sowed mass dispossession of the educated. Historically, the harvest that yields is revolution.

Contra the scurrilous implications of America’s legion Dignity of Work scolds, a great many Americans would do productive work if they got the chance or have the chance and do exactly that. We often don’t see counterfactual happen in the wild, because America runs not on Dunkin, but on coercion. If extended unemployment isn’t axed, who will be willing to work at Applebee’s? We’re trying to run a business here! We’re trying to run an economy! I dunno. Maybe try not groping $2.13-an-hour teenyboppers in the walk-in freezer for a while. See what happens then. Notice, too, that we’re running low on the local kids who historically staff the restaurant industry because of exactly the set of incentives that allowed the restaurant industry to become so bloated in the first place, i.e., ordering the national economy to the proliferation of one-child-policy yuppies.

This is the future conservatives want, too, especially Never Trump conservatives. Sic, mostly. The same people who get up and yell about soft whiners and their avocado toast take every opportunity to deputize volunteer programs as arms of the state, on the theory that forcing the unemployed to work or volunteer (hey, asshole, could you give me the dignity of saying that I work?) will forcibly build character in the otherwise restive poor. One thing this definitely accomplishes is turning volunteer programs into strange attractors for the worst sorts of beancounters and busybodies, repelling good people who mind their own business enough to actually get shit done.

The way this country is structured and run, it’s impossible to piece together a national labor budget. It’s impossible to figure out how many billions of hours of work a day or year it actually takes to run this fucking joint. It can be impossible to come up with a county-level labor budget. This is before we even try to figure out how much extra work we’d have to do if we made our own shit instead of importing it all from China and Bangladesh. Maybe that’d inspire us to buy less shit.

For the same reasons, it’s impossible to come up with a budget for how much of the work, or “work,” we do as a nation is bullshit. How can we fault Mona for wanting to milk this beast dry? It’s hard to get by these days without pulling that titty, and it’s a hard titty to pull. You won’t have the energy to crank it and yank it if you think about how the hell there’s a drop left in the udder. That’s for Mexicans and Chinamen.

*****

There’s some darkly amusing meta to the literary enterprise that produces works like “Mona at Sea.” We discussed the rich versus the truly rich earlier. Too much leisure can be toxic. This is something American voters and officials might want to consider before setting the same dogshit employment policy as ever. In any event, the true upper class is much more comfortable with leisure than the upper middle class, and it shows. Actual abundance is the best way to develop a mindset of abundance, not that Stephen Covey would know this as the grandson of charter members of the LDS Church and all that. Decent scions of families like his are no-names, not A-List self-help authors who grift the VA with their training seminar materials.

Upper-middles are scared to death that they’ll collapse into ruin if they ever stop running. That’s one of the things that horrifies and scandalizes them about their unemployed Millennial children and peers. We show them show them some of their alternatiive life paths, paths they might have taken if they weren’t balls-to-the-wall hustlers who punch down at every opportunity, paths they even still might take to make room for decent people who just can’t compete with them. I don’t know what our hikikomori are getting out of their anime habits. Maybe it includes an understanding of why so many salarymen raised hikikomori back in the bukkake motherland.

One of the cultural effects of upper middle class striver neurosis is discomfort with storylines that don’t involve some kind of apocalyptic quest. Their literature can’t be one of comfortable stasis in life, or merely entertaining stasis. The postmodern canon has no room for authors like Faulkner. Americans today can’t cope with fiction mostly bereft of sex, grand adventures, grand quests, and rites of passage. We can’t process characters who are drawn as object lessons, not role models. We’ve been raised not to understand any of this shit.

Conservatives like to critique sexualized literature as coarsening. It’s reasonable enough to read “I Am Charlotte Simmons” as a lengthy anti-sex bildungsroman, full as it is of shambolic characters who are sexually active and miserable. Tom Wolfe, another great of the Southern Canon, was too hypomanic to keep it in a fellow’s pants himself. There we have it. Sex–which, as the discography of Soulja Boy and Robin Thicke shows, we aren’t particularly having–gives a quick and dirty dopamine hit, not the kind of maintenance dose Faulkner administers with his collection of schizoids and paranoiacs and so forth. That Swedish beefcake in “Snow Falling On Cedars” gets to nut in his white wife in the shower after work while her Japanese ex-boyfriend goes on trial for murder, in a story surprisingly free of suicide for the maritime side of Washington State. Real smart collection of ethnics they propagated up there, huh. The author went on to win a bad sex writing award in absentia for a retelling of Oedipus Rex, conferred upon him in the name of “David Guterous.”

Is sex what’s wrong with bad literature, then? I wish that were it. It isn’t what’s wrong with Harry Potter. The Potterverse doesn’t have any, if I understand it correctly. For a generation and a class so focused on status and purged of sensuality, that sounds about right, flying around on broom adventures for clout while the Cockneys dutifully run the physical plant. The UK doesn’t account for its actual economy, either. As financial hubs go, London is arguably even worse than New York. The Potterverse is Downton Abbey for twerps with an excessive interest in ersatz paranormal phenomena. The biggest problem with these cases is that they’re given white-collar jobs.

I’d rather bust in some dude’s Swedish wife like I’m Chad Kroeger than grant that horseshit children’s series the validity its fans demand. Maybe I’ll skim “Mona At Sea” after all, for possible sex. The reviews mention something along the lines of blackmail material from social media. That’s the kind of dirt fraternity and sorority archivists used to keep on graduates. It was enough for Turkish intelligence to get Dennis Hastert to sandbag resolutions condemning the Armenian genocide. It is good and normal that an entire generation of digital natives has been lectured about the reputational threat of posting nudes or drinking pictures, and meanwhile the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House was being blackmailed for sexually initiating high school wrestlers under his authority. Put me in Coach!

More people actually working for a living would reduce this crap. The problem is, it’s hard to make a living working, and that’s exactly as capital wants it. Uber is out of drivers? Well shucks. Can’t see how that happened! Let’s see how it does with inside-sales subprime auto loans as a recruitment tool.

Meanwhile a girl in Tucson is out of college and out of work. It’s good to hear about a novel whose moral is that hustling ain’t worth shit. It won’t become worth anything again until we do less of it.

That fucking putz

Andrew Cuomo is in the news again, for the first time in an hour, grandstanding about how you should get out and see people, do things, recall the governor. Oh. Maybe not that last part, if we muster the impertinence to ask him.

Cuomo is #NotMyGovernor. I live in California. It disgusts me that he is my parents’ governor. We’ve been over this before, and I’ve been more than over him. His current exhortations to get out and stop being reclusive and avoidant is basically gaslighting. It’s hard to be sure he’s forward-thinking enough to deliberately gaslight, given all the awful shit he impulsively blurts out in the moment. He’s manipulative as all hell, but he’s a creature of chaos.

His chaos evokes Donald Trump’s, but as usual, I’m pretty sure it’s worse, and he is, too. The Donald shows little interest in bossing the little people around. It always bears repeating that Trump upsets the Brahmin chattering classes and their PMC subalterns because he openly, plainly beefs with revered political scumbags who are, by sacred tradition, accustomed to the due deference of their seniority and station. Trump had the nerve to directly insubordinate himself to them in full public view. He had the nerve to openly relish it. Jen Psaki is obviously a catty, manipulative asshole in private–she all but openly is in public–but she gets a pass for observing Beltway etiquette.

Cuomo is a man of terrible manners. He enjoys permanent dispensation to act like that because he’s to the governorship born. He has the good savvy to grease all the right wheels, of course. A gruff but relatively decent governor’s son like Jerry Brown wouldn’t get far by openly telling bad actors to get fucked and airing their /John Fogerty B Side I’m definitely not being blackmailed voice/ dirty laundry. New York politics have an unwashed crass transactionality worthy of Chicago. This is true of the city and the state. Upstate New York is swamped by Downstate and New York City, and Downstate would be have trouble holding its own against the city if the state line were drawn at the far edges of Ulster and Dutchess. But really, the whole state is like that. Rochester and Green Island pull the same shit. Menands uses Interstate 787 as a tax-farming platform to extort fines out of motorists for bogus moving violations, just like Steilacoom and Roy. (Ferguson’s entire government is a gang of highway robbers.) One end of the town has one dipshit with a plow crew responsible for clearing driveways after storms; the other end has a different crew of dipshits.

It goes back to Hamilton. Cuomo got ahead and stayed ahead by giving the hustlers their daily greasing. Rivers Casino is Schenectady’s economy now because it generates GDP, which is a useless made-up proxy but we don’t care about that. It “creates” “jobs.” There’s better work to be done that would actually make Schenectady a better place to live, but again, we aren’t here to care about backwards shit like that. We’re here to lure tourists in from downstate or crossstate or Connecticut or, on the Justin Time schedule, Canada. The communities sending Schenectady its tourists will in turn squeeze some share of the Capital District’s traveling Schenctards. It’s the same three-card monte the good old boys (and girls!) run at the local scale through gentrification projects. Churn the circular canal and skim off the top.

As usual, the brunt of the workload gets dumped onto untermenschen: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, J-1 Slavs, prisoners, deplorables. That’s what happens when nine-to-fives refuse to work. I can’t blame them. The incentives suck. I can barely afford to do farm work myself. It’s the same case for many Mexicans, just worse. I’m backstopped against debt. For people without kids, the classes of debt the poor take on are worse than living in a car or couchsurfing. I say this having slept in my car more times than I can count. Once the poor get into debt, it immediately becomes viable as a Why Not Both. America’s nine-to-fives are painfully aware of this. It’s buried pain, but they feel it. It chills their bones.

That’s why Applebee’s is “hiring.” Whom? The last thing our aggrieved shortstaffed employers will do is admit that they’re trying to pay and treat their people better instead of worse. NPR keeps airing Both Sides segments for employers to complain that they can’t compete with the government’s welfare compensation packages. If the producers need to drop one of the sides for some more tranny talk (not Chartock, and not Car Talk), they’ll gladly drop the voice of labor. Marketplace, bizarrely, is one of the shows that doesn’t. *Smoothly greasy Kai Ryssdal voice* This–is Mao Hour.

This bullshit about economic incentives and disincentives and nudge your slimy Beltway ass into the Tidal Basin, or rather nudges, is a great example of what these assholes try to do for a living instead of anything a reasonable person would classify as work.

They’re the ones who shitted up the stimmy. Trump came to them with a straightforward proposal to give a whole bunch of people a big check, but their marginally employable loser relatives and cronies needed policy analyst jobs instead of the allowances and childhood bedrooms they’d otherwise get from their parents, so they fine-tuned it into a means-tested kludge. The Oaf of Office instinctively recognizes that ordinary Americans fucking hate that shit, all of it. Every dysfunctional system that makes Americans suicidal is run like that: the IRS as a consequence of the tax schemes it’s mandated to enforce, the welfare bureaucracy, education, health insurance, grants for everything under the sun.

Trump knows it’s popular to just have the government give everybody some money. His opponents don’t care. Straightforward government checks any dumbass can understand don’t make the West Wing crowd feel important. They don’t make them feel needed and valued for their expertise. Busybody nerds can’t stand universal free programs.

Cuomo suffers from a tragically monumental ego. It’s insatiable. He’s governor, following in his father’s footsteps but forever in his shadow. Nepotism is not the root of Cuomo’s problem, as Jerry Brown has shown throughout his career. He needs to be in charge. That’s his idea of leadership. Many politicians approach their love of power with a measure of subtlety. They love power, but they also take pride in being of service. Cuomo’s thing is histrionic heroics. He needs to save the day. He saves the day by bossing the lesser orders around. Stay home. Okay, now go out. Go home. Okay, now go out again. Give your quarantine form to the National Guard at the airport for permission to enter the state. Guardsmen may meet your train at Penn Station, but only if it’s Amtrak, and probably only if it’s long-distance. Don’t think about the inconsistency of not intercepting almost any other incoming traffic or the civil liberties implications or the disturbing questions of what the hell happened at the nursing homes.

The Governor cares. The rest of the state would be better off if he didn’t.

Cuomo’s goal isn’t to be a steadying hand. It’s to be a grand hand. He leads and his people listen. He’s Qaddafi minus the fun comstumes. He presided over one of the most horrific Covid-19 death tolls in the world, then got the networks to cover his grandiose news conferences (he has a brother at one, after all) and threw the state’s weight around with intrusive, manipulative public health theater shows like the Excelsior Pass.

He isn’t there to safeguard his constituents. He’s there to pretend. If he’s too high on his own supply to tell the difference, does it even matter?

Cuomo’s constituents won’t take the state back from him, or can’t. Maybe they enjoy the leash. Surely a few do–New York City has become even more of a reservoir of unfortunate perversions than it was prior to Giuliani–but most probably either benefit from the crookedness or feel powerless to bring it to a halt. Many of those who might try have fled to Florida or the Poconos. Replacing them with gentrifiers and immigrants or porque no los dos has mediocre civic effects, as any project would if most of its members couldn’t vote and the ones who could have shit for economic politics. The Chapo left-liberal types seem to punch above their demographic and political weight. Not every cultural phenomenon is a political or demographic phenomenon.

Mind you, I’m spitballing this part wetter than most of the rest of it; take it with salt to distaste. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think the role of property ownership in voting patterns and turnout is adequately appreciated in American politics in general, and more voters in New York City own property than the average American imagines. The rest of the state is much closer to the national average.

Cuomo is a more naked scold than most about his prerogative to treat his office as a control room full of dials he can turn at will to dictate public opinion and behavior. It’s Hamilton by way of Bernays by way of Giuliani and his worst cops, as interpreted by the guy who tried to honor his father’s legacy by saying “nigger wops” in front of Alan Chartock. The old Hamiltonian model was awful, but to its credit, its main purpose was to tell the grunts what to do and how miserably little they’d be paid to do it. Over the years, more and more busybodies and scolds folded their shit into the mix. It’s probably no coincidence that New York is one of the great centers of global advertising. The skim keeps many in country houses, too comfortable and sheltered to repudiate Cornelius Vanderbilt and his legacy–why, hello, Mr. Cooper–for being abusive and privileged enough to get his wife committed to an asylum for refusing to leave Staten Island. More than a few of the rich are manipulative enough to consider bogus commitment proceedings in family disputes a good thing.

The putz wants us to go traveling again. Excuse me, who the fuck asked you for an opinion, pops? That right there is the piece of shit who scared me out of visiting my parents for months after the case counts dropped to my satisfaction with that abusive interstate quarantine order and the Guard deployments. I don’t hate or resent him as much for now pumping up a wave of rebound travel, but he still fucking disgusts me for doing that. Travel this summer is going to be awful. My experience flying east the other week sure was. Burbank and National were fine, and Santa Rosa was manageable, but Charlotte was slammed and LAX was just fucking awful. Our masters are ginning up extra rebound travel on top of what we’re naturally (or unnaturally?) facing so we can spend fifteen minutes in line at Hudson News to drop eight bucks on a barely edible sandwich from the poor man’s Pret-a-Manger.

They knew something like that would happen. Every supply line and workforce needed to run the tourist hospitality sector got rekt for a year, and now they want to just turn everything back on, like water heated precisely to 120 F out of a waterfall shower in one of their lofts. Ain’t happening, pal.

What they’re really doing is playing mind games with the proles, as ever, and insider-trading both sides of a market crash and rebound. They know when to place their positions. They know when to get in, when to get out, and where to spent the loot. If a crowded hub terminal in one of the busiest airports in the country has a single overwhelmed newsstand with garbage for food as its sole concession during the redeye rush, they’ll do what they always do: fly private. If the traveling public suffers for trying to reunite with loved ones in the thick of a substantially engineered travel rush, we’ll still be excellent profit centers.

I, for one, can’t wait to hear the next good news out of Rivers Casino once we’re done hearing the current good news out of Amazon’s new warehouse in Schodack.

Fulfillment center. Christ.

God help us if they ever force Carol off the media

Dammit, Douglas, you incorrigible Maritime heartthrob, I may sound too hypomanic not to get Hortons on mane, but this time the pride is again th’ American Side’s, as it happens. Radio so bad, Big Ears Teddy will turn himself back around and refuse not to “bear” witness.

Have I used that one before? It’s about time in any event. The big news this time for us public radio trainspotters, as Colby Cosh calls us, pertains to On The Media, a program on the media. They sure as hell weren’t gonna call it On The Bala Cynwyd, am I right, Garf. #ThatWasBad #DudeItsRude. It turns out that that urbane Main Line dean of reporters was a toxic asshole who liked to throw bullying tantrums around the office and failing to abide by HR’s demands that he behave himself. Justice in his case was not particularly swift, but it was dramatic. Bob’s permanently away this week. I’m Brooke, and I’m glad about it.

That was also bad. It shouldn’t be a terrible surprise to hear that Garfield’s personality fell short of his persona. These are actors. If you find Buddha on the road, kill him. If you find Michael State on Facebook, repost parish hall normcore. My ex thinks he sounds like a slut and Beth Huizenga is out of her goddamn mind.

Whatever. As much as they’re anything, they’re entertainers. We invite them into our homes and cars and workout headsets and mind. We fancy them friends, buddy. Good guys. They work in a dynamic business, working urgently to balance the unbalanced on the fly on strict deadlines. It should be no surprise that more than a few of them are unbalanced themselves. They’re theater kids.

Excuse me: theatre kids.

The worst of these actors take advantage of the high pressure, high stakes, and tight deadlines to justify behaving however the hell they want. In Jian Ghomeshi’s case, this meant not just choking women but berating his production staff to pull everything together while he went incommunicado on deadline because he was having a mood. It’s a miracle Q was ever ready by airtime.

You have to have thick skin to hack it in the business. Jian Ghomeshi has exceptionally thin skin. What they really mean is you have to have thick skin to work around Jian Ghomeshi. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if he’s even happy with himself, no matter how inexcusable it was for him to take his disappointments and upsets out on staff and threaten to get colleagues blacklisted for saying anything bad about him, e.g., his renown for choking a bitch.

Radio is no place for a sensitive little crybaby, the Bob Garfields of the world like to say. They say the same thing about running a restaurant, working in an operating room, and every sleazy sort of sales work. Complaints about political correctness and oversensitivity consistently come from or on behalf of the most hypersensitive, emotionally incontinent outburst artists in whatever business is under discussion.

It’s always about maintaining the existing power dynamics. First they came for Bob Garfield, and I said nothing, because Bob Garfield had contractual employment protections and guild representation the likes of which I never expect to enjoy. An ordinary line employee would be fired on the spot for pulling that shit, assuredly so for doing anything of the sort to a supervisor. It’s only certain people who enjoy the latitude to throw bullying fits around the office. To WNYC’s credit, it lost its patience with Garfield for persisting in screaming at colleagues and subordinates over editorial differences and has previously released hosts as prominent as John Hockenberry for being sex pests. To its discredit, it seems to have quite a few problem personalities. As we say online, you truly hate to see Tanzina Vega on the HR list.

Living vicarious professional lives through the personnel disputes of media bigshots is pathetic. They’re nothing like us. Theirs is a different, separate, alien world. Lead characters in all media are infamously prone to be divas. This doesn’t make their behavior acceptable. If Bob Garfield’s behavior was as chronically problematic as WNYC’s outside auditor found, he needed some time away from the studio to chill the hell out. Terminating him outright was a reasonable decision when he’d already been formally warned to keep his temper in check.

“Cancel culture” is a red herring. The much bigger threat to the occupational viability of ordinary Americans is the combination of merciless at-will employment; intrusive, abusive employers; and the strategic absence of government job guarantees or even the faintest glimmer of full employment policies. It isn’t Bob Garfield getting shitcanned for having an unacceptable anger management problem at work and having to go on Twitter and Substack to complain about it, still a public citizen. It isn’t Don Imus getting axed not to talk about “nappy-headed hoes,” or rather, for talking about “nappy-headed hoes.”

It was some kind of foul feelings towards a team of lady ballers, I recall. To paraphrase the Ghetto-Ass Bitches of 103rd Street, their hair always gone BE nappy. The people who make the hiring and firing decisions in these cases don’t spend much time on the Blue Line, but that’s beside the point. Imus upset and scandalized the advertisers. He knew he was pushing the envelope by being racially edgy on air. They heard that tirade and decided they’d had enough.

Some of these characters are Greekly tragic. Garfield sounds more like a garden-variety bully who elected to dispense with self-control around the office, a man with an awful temperament but a sincere love of journalism and interest in its cultural context. Rush Limbaugh was something else entirely, a bitter old man who had every creature comfort and still bitterly fumed about random strangers being cheats or freeloaders or loafers because the bitterness and the fuming made him ever richer and more popular. As a young man, Rush wanted to do baseball radio; he was passionate about it and impressed people with his encyclopedic knowledge of it. The problem with this career is that it would have left him doing the yeoman’s work for yeoman’s pay in some local or regional market. The money was in being an angry reactionary who always sounded and looked ready to drop dead of a heart attack.

Wow Much rosebud Such sad. I can’t imagine having a platform of that topical latitude and not using it to reach out to loved ones I’ve lost and miss, to say good things about them in terms vague but recognizable to them and the real heads who know them, much as I sometimes do here with an audience of several of you, give or entirely take. I’m still dealing with a fresh breakup, but I might still be hella emo about this shit in more placid, less troubling personal times, with a somewhat more normal emotional and spiritual life. I truly don’t get why people like Limbaugh don’t pivot back to baseball once they’ve gotten some fuck-you money, just open up a free-for-all call-in about the Cardinals or whatever because the audience is already there and will gladly follow them to other platforms in the event of programming disputes.

Commercial radio is a collection of cesspools different from NPR’s. The lowest common denominators Rush Limbaugh exploited included the desire to rape. Guys who would have tested the waters more carefully in their local bars found, if we may, a safe space on his show and other syndicated garbage heaps of that sort to fume about how women were asking for it. Most of the commentary was sublimated enough to keep the advertisers from flipping their shit, but it was about rape. Imus’s comment about the basketball team touched on the ugly, arguably epigenetic American history of racialized rape, maybe only subconsciously, but it was a real factor.

Their target demographic is the same one that expresses its disgruntlement that the broads these days need to lighten up, toughen up, and just deal with a little light touch and talk around the office. The reasons to try to do better than that are obvious and compelling, and they aren’t all liberal in nature, either. In some sense or other, they’re all fundamentally conservative; the point is to try to set and hold a working sexual ethic that keeps the dumbest, worst elements in the workplace from using it to distract all and distress many by being uncontrollably horny all the time. As I’ve said before, Hillz is the conservative on this shit and the Donald the liberal. America is still not ready to have this conversation, but nevertheless, she persisted–in this analogy, I’m not with her, but personally her–to #GetTalking.

*George Nori Voice* Dominic, from Windsor, California, on the Wildcard Line. Go ahead.

The aliens consented.

They consented to what?

The aliens all consented.

Are you saying you consented to their sexual advances?

They consented.

[Sagest Dril Voice] Butt they care not,, too “Fap Only.” *Seinfeld electronica scene break*

Am I right fellas, etc., all that. That’s a big swath of who listens to that garbage, and a bigger chunk of the disposable income the advertisers covet: winery scions who can damn well afford to hire hookers but instead go into politics to rape their fellow elected officials. More than a few listeners are the doers of Denny Dundiddy deals; as fewer point out than care to hear, the loudest on any given seedy or perverted thing having to do with sex tend to be the worst about it themselves.

But now goodness, Sgt. Karsnia, I thought the acoustics in that restroom were just fine!

Yeah, I’m flying, too, on the night shift (on the night shift). Seriously, though, this combination of sexual repression and abuse is a significant reason why so many people are reluctant to engage in the workforce. Expanded to include other forms of abuse intersecting with sexual abuse, it’s a main reason. Decades of unrelenting propaganda about how it’s good to be abused at work–The Office, The Apprentice, Uber as hustle culture–have somewhat backfired. Work? Ah, yeah, work, that’s where you go to get annoyed by morons and treated like shit by assholes for poverty wages and then fired for displeasing one of them.

The whole edifice is shakier than it’s made out to be. Office normcore as a dipshit cover for abusive scheduling practices may be stable. Offfice normcore as a cover for sexual harassment of subordinates is metastable at most. That’s the kind of shit that has male loved ones cleaning their guns. The academic and affluent nature of activism against campus rape pisses off Walt Kowalski wannabes who call in to talk shows to bitch about how everybody’s so goddamn soft these days. It’s much less objectionable to people in the same towns–conservative, liberal, left, whatever–who are sick of getting groped by scumbag customers and shift managers at Applebee’s for a summarily recovable pittance, or who are furious that their sisters, wives, or daughters are being mistreated in that fashion. Company men were allowed to abuse longshormen’s daughters as a hiring condition until they weren’t. It had to do with their discovery that getting beaten to shit for trying to have their way was a credible promise, not an idle threat.

Bob Garfield ain’t got shit on that crew. He’d be on the mild side among franchisee sex pests. The Grey Lady accuses him of using “a barnyard epithet.” I’m not exactly fascinated, but bullshit, I guess? He’s mainly nursing a bruised ego from getting canned from a job where he sounded rather miserable anyway. It’s a useful object lesson in not being able to get away with that shit just for being prominent and playing the urbane WASP Jew on the radio. I didn’t even give a shit when I discovered he’s actually a Jew. He’s not exactly fun like Psychotarp or Pot-o-Shit Friend or Steph, in case the first two are having trouble with their sisters. #TooSoon. All he did was clean up from his disinhibited fits and emo moping in time to do the gentleman-scholar thing on NPR every week, or more recently every two or three weeks, depending on when Brooke Gladstone was hosting in his stead, stoically but now audibly quite the frosty Jewess herself.

Jewish conspiracy? I know, enough about NPR, but those two could barely conspire to put out a fucking radio show. As the old Brooklyn proverb warns, Christ, Mort, are you enough of a putz to believe a pile of crap like that?

As much as it must sting to be fired, Garfield picked a good country for his termination. He might be shocked to discover what happens to the easily upset when they get agitated in Canada under the name of Robert.

Up the Hershey Highway again

If Jimmy Carter had nominated Rachel Levine for a cabinet office, Joe Biden would have spent the month fuming, verbatim, about “the trannies.” I don’t see why he isn’t talking like that in private this month, assuming he’s verbal (and that’s assuming a lot!) That’s exactly the crudity of thought that got Levine nominated in the first place.”C’mon, man, I’ve got a Negress, a bunch a’ other broads, a faggot, and a transvestite! Gimme a break, Jack!”

There’s no political strategy to Levine’s nomination. There’s a narrow technical argument to be made that it shores up the support or enthusiasm of cultural liberals, but that’s a risky strategy. Trans rights are politically fraught, to say the least, in case anyone was puzzled by the spate of mishaps at “gender reveal” parties (#TeshTips: The noun, possibly mentioned in the Bible, is “revelation”), and voters who find ladyboy idpol inspiring are all Blue No Matter Who cult freaks. “How can we alienate the most swing voters by pandering to the narrowest, most marginal, most controversial part of our coalition?” It’s certainly a question Democrats ask, and yes, I wish I meant that sarcastically.

Biden, or Harris, nominated Levine for even coarser, seedier reasons. It’s an inept, offensive gambit to keep the coalition’s unruly leftists in line. Geez Louise, Jack, we gotcha your he-she, Mack! Voting against the presidency responsible for this nightmare would be bigotry. Huh. Am I allowed to be bigoted against a person because I’ve personally met shit and had a bad personal experience with shit? What I’m saying is, I refused to darken that freak’s exam room a second time back when she was still Richard. I have higher priorities than what the nomination to high federal office of the worst physician who has ever examined me means for trans rights or representation in government. That’s a case of whoa, she should NOT be in medicine, and she needs to be banished down out of medicine, not up into a position of official authority over it.

We hear a great deal these days about “qualifications,” always in a bogus credentialist sense meant to subvert the plain, expressly narrow constitutional qualifications for office. Rachel Levine is old enough and American enough for an assistant cabinet post. So am I, and I’m more fit. I’d consider the office a burden requiring me to live up to great, solemn duties of public trust. Levine is trying to get herself Peter Principled, and I know she never meant to have one, up out of an equivalent state-level position in which she got hundreds of medically fragile constituents killed just last calendar year. What assholes who bitch about the “qualified” versus the “unqualified” mean by the former is 1) having jumped through professional hoops, in a manner prioritizing outcome over process if there’s any conflict between the two, and 2) being politically agreeable. The honorable thing for them to do would be to focus on political agreeability, which is their actual aim, and shut up about “qualifications” as a synonum for fitness for office, since they’d never tolerate a callous freak like Levine if they actually cared about fitness. I don’t expect them to do anything of the sort, of course. They’re thoroughly dishonorable.

What I don’t entirely understand is why Tom Wolf, who seems overly idealistic but sensible, ever elevated that freakish dipshit to appointed statewide office. For all I know it may have been blackmail. Damned if I can say blackmail of whom, but hot diggity, Denny, we can take the plausibility of this one straight to the mat, way down low. Is #FOOTBALL also heterosexual, like wrestling? I ran cross country in high school, back when I still lived in Pennsylvania. The first mile was always easier.

#WeAre! #TooSoon! Wolf was probably just being a bleeding heart. It’s also all too plausible that he was prevailed upon to remove Levine from full-time clinical duties at Hershey. There’s always a benefit to removing a case of that extremity from medical practice. Elevation to a directorship of public health is a terrible way to do it, but it doesn’t eliminate what Mainers call the relative benefits. Instead of practicing medicine all the time, she was practicing medicine some of the time, or maybe just instructing unfortunate medical students, and spending the rest of the time either fucking off for a living or telling other doctors what to do.

In a more functional society, public office would have served Levine, and crucially the public, as a veal pen. Fatten up, moo a little bit, just don’t wander out here and bother us while we’re trying to work. Instead she meddled catastrophically in the Covid response and got constituent’s her mother’s age killed en masse in nursing homes. Did she leave her mother in the home? Hell no. She got Mom the hell out of that dump to save her life.

But that’s just one bad officer holding one office in one state out of fifty and one commonwealth out of four. Between the states and the territories, there were dozens of people the Biden Administration could have chosen over Levine from exactly the equivalent offices. There were hundreds upon hundreds of state cabinet officers they could have chosen.

Levine was Wolf’s problem. She’s not a problem I’d want to have, but I haven’t voted in Pennsylvania in over a decade. Now she’s up for confirmation to a federal cabinet office. Goddammit she is my problem after all. Son of a bitch. Why in all hell did they have to No Peter Priciple her into HHS?

Oh yeah. Shit. They have to keep the voters they’re ratfucking in line to reward them for committing serial abuse. Don’t dwell on how we’re betraying you every bit as badly as you feared when you voted for us; think about the diversity of our cabinet, trannies and all.

I don’t think it’ll work. It’s a perfect setup for a whopping Bradley Effect in 2022 and 2024. Levine is arguably the most fucked up person they could have elevated out of an organization that has also recently harbored Our Lord Joseph, His Servants Gerald and Graham, a child psychiatrist who was caught with child pornography on his office computer as part of his unapproved “study,” and another psychiatrist who got his card yanked by the medical board for marrying his patient. Don’t worry; the only one who summarily fired was the Boer spook, and he promptly washed up on the shores of the Beltway.

Seriously, nobody’s gonna fucking vote for that shit if they keep refusing to deliver. Levine will be either irrelevant or notorious. They expect to bully and shame us all into keeping both Democratic caucuses in the majority and Kamala Harris in the White House. Let’s face it: Biden isn’t even the president now lmao. He’s the titular president, and he pipes up with suggestions from time to time. Harris can obviously run circles around that skull full of cream of wheat. Of course, they’re gonna all be like, hey, look! A faggot! A tranny! A colored gal! I paraphrase. Ordinary voters will be disgusted that they all had to be dragged out of the uncanny valley. NPR caters to the hardly overpowering faction of well-to-do voters who can stand to listen to woke idpol shit. It catches some downwardly mobile ascribed bougies and some social climbers, too, but if the economy doesn’t turn around come the midterms–and I mean the whole real economy, including everything involving money, like healthcare and schooling–they’ll lose the last of their patience and help hose the Democratic Party off the Hill.

Joe Biden is a bigoted asshole who decided to start bringing freaks and phonies into his orbit for use as tokens, in the disgraceful hope of distracting the public from his rotten misgovernment. He’d still be fuming about forced bussing if that were still where he saw the clout. It’s considered unfit for polite company these days, so he doesn’t. It’s off-brand for a man of “empathy” and “decency,” i.e., still what he believes as a reactive thug who challenges other men to fistfights for asking him policy questions and feels up their wives. He still says the same kind of shit on hot mics that he was saying on the Senate Floor before I was born, just sometimes with less coherence.

He isn’t plainspoken; he’s a foultempered bigot, always on the lookout for a chance to punch down. He’s still racist as hell. That’s how he got to spend eight years as the lieutenant for a fellow white supremacist, the man whose office he now holds, if he’s able to hold anything for ten seconds. Joe Biden is Richard Nixon, but less gracious, less liberal, and less intelligent.

That’s the fucking thing. All a politician has to do to convince our retarded Washington press corps that he’s “working-class” is use some shit-tier folksy syntax. Those are supposed to be some of the keenest political minds in a country of over three hundred million, and all it takes to hoodwink them is to very crudely play against type. Tricky Dick, who was painfully aware of his own modest blue-collar upbringing, made a point of speaking in full, coherent, grammatically correct sentences. LBJ, the Texas-bred graduate of a normal school, took the same approach. Sonny Bush, a legacy Yalie and legacy president from the summering set, headfaked a nation of goobers with strings of downhome gibberish: food on your family, power to power the power of the generating plants, other shit the scrambled likes of which he definitively did not say in private. Trump, too, was less lucid in public than in private, although it takes true oratorical skill, including mental organization, to say some of the outrageous things he said and loop back onto topic from ridiculous streams of consciousness. Our presidents have been good Toastmasters, crummy Toastmasters, great Toastmasters, horrible Toastmasters. Woodrow Wilson’s PhD was neither from MIT nor from a crummy college. Yes, Virginia, there were racists in New Jersey back then, too.

Biden is granted “working-class” and “blue-collar” street cred for making utterances ranging from the rude to the abusive to the belligerent in a moderately rough Mid-Atlantic accent. It works because he does it for other worse-than-useless mandarins. It isn’t for the working class; it’s for affluent and rich twerps who have never socialized with anyone from the working class. Some of the most urbane people I’ve ever known come from genuinely working-class upbringings. One of them is the son of a Pittsburgh steelworker. Inweaved in the Extensive, whose parents owned “a goddamn steel mill” (a different one, I’d hope), had the son of a shop steward for the mail carrier’s local in Scranton editing his term papers. This wasn’t the smart leading the dumb so much as the exasperated brilliant trying to teach the intelligent to write English as well as they spoke it.

Any of them are enough to convince me that Funny Uncle Joe’s shtick is lame. He’s a salesman’s son who’s spent his career trying to convince idiots that he’s somehow not a lawyer by using obnoxiously meaningless sales talk sprinkled with half-coherent legalese. He was never blue-collar, and his father was never blue-collar. It’s some bullshit his handlers helped him make up, same as the “decency” and “empathy” of a dotard too senile to reliably walk in the right direction for twenty yards who was going to “hit the ground running” upon his inauguration.

None of this horseshit points to anything he’s ever actually done, other than being buddies with some Amtrak conductors. He’s a total phony.

We’re entirely right to resent First State Skull Pudding and everyone around him with a passion. They’re fully qualified for public office. So is the morbidly obese Plymouth-Whitemarsh community trust retard I once met, the one who told me about how he’d chat up the teenyboppers guarding the pool at his apartment complex: “So I go up to them, and I say, hey, sweetheart. What’s your name? Where do you live?” We’re absolutely right to resent anyone who confuses qualification for office with fitness as a way to buffalo ideological opponents out of the way. That retard wasn’t fit to be undersecretary of health, either. To his credit, though, he never tried to practice medicine.

Yes, Rachel Levine is qualified for cabinet appointment. She’s a US citizen of constitutionally sufficient age who has not been adjudicated liable to ask the lifeguard where she lives. Actually, that’s exactly how clumsy Levine was when he examined me. By the way, she looked worse as a man. You /sagest Dril voice/ do not gotta hand it to Kenneth Fitzhugh for murdering his wife, or for being normal, but you do for looking all right. Charles Cullen was never sexy enough for an Indiana license, either.

Again, that does not mean Levine has any business anywhere near public office. Do they even fucking vet these assholes? Gee, let’s check with her last employer and, well, shucks, that isn’t what we were hoping to find. Instead, Jen Psaki is up there smugly noting that Janet Yellen is a woman, not a crook. For God’s sake Stephanie Lazarus is a Jewess, too, but I don’t think many of us would be complaining about her conflicts of interest if she were appointed director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Also she’s killed fewer people.

That’s the quality of leadership that gets coughed up in our meritocracy. No, not Steph; it’s a miracle she didn’t make RHD in time to investigate herself. And not the creepy silver foxes or the fat retard, either. I mean the rest of them. They’re awful. Meritocracy that slow guy’s ass, and mine, too. They do not merit our respect. They merit our scorn and fury.

Decency

Mike Mersky assaulted me for using profanity in a school hallway. He bumrushed me up against a wall in front of dozens of other students for two or three syllables of unmemorably light Heavy Seven. You pricked your finger and then fingered your prick? Use some lotion next time! 

If I’d had a set of fucking balls I would have gone to the police and probably had him fired within the week. It’s fine to squirm around courtside and bark moves at the lady ballers, but the safe way to act like Bobby Knight is to be Robert Montgomery Knight, and Mersky wasn’t it. He wasn’t even a Benjamin Montgomery Robinson; that was no union gig he had with us. My problem was that I was being low-key community blackmailed over mental and behavioral health moments that were more innocuous than the Mike Move but seedier.

I’ll still swear, to this day, that Mike Mersky assaulted me in his capacity as a school principal, to wit, the immediate successor of Headmaster Dick Johnson. That was why we needed to watch our language around the Day School. It would have been scandalous of us to address one another as the man in charge of all thirteen grades at our school. 

Mersky wasn’t any coarser than Lieutenant Tittytorque, but he was worse. Lieutenant Tittytorque forcefeeding me Jim Beam, slamming four times as much Jimmy himself, and then grabbing my nipples to tune in WWVA was 100% voluntary association, just as Tocqueville wanted it. None of that was ever a good idea, but that beefy freak did not hold authority in loco parentis. When the principal is acting like that, or God help us all the school cop, it’s past time to nip that shit in the bud. 

It hit me this evening, as I walked out on Joe Biden’s unseemly victory speech celebrating the recording of the Electoral College’s statehouse voting conventions to pick up an order of dim sum: Mike Mersky is Joe Biden is Mike Mersky. They’re the same fucking bastard. They’re the same coarse, insufferably greasy middlebrow Mid-Atlantic piece of shit. They talk the same, they strut the same, they bark abuse the same. 

I have no reason to believe that Mersky is a sex pest or a pervert–worth mentioning, obviously, because Funny Uncle Joe is overtly both–but otherwise they’re the same dangerous, disgusting thing. Mersky loved to say, “I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you.” Yeah, that’s what I expect you to be, you cunt. You run this fucking school. Malarkey, we might call it. Man alive, Corn Pop, I’m gonna brain ya with this chain, Jack. 

First State Skull Pudding has the permanent, total privilege to utter threats and fighting words at close range in front of witnesses and news cameras, grope, assault, and forcibly rape where Mike Mersky does not because Joe is two or three quanta farther up and out. When teachers do that it’s a contigent privilege, innit, Denny. Put me in Coach! I mean, put Coach in me! I mean, gimme some cash, Coach! You’re ready to pay! In ways it’s surprising that Denny Dundiddly went down for what Denny Dundiddily dun, but he was after an ex-Speaker with a personal fortune in the mere mid-seven figures. What stands out about so many other sexually compromised guys above him–Clinton, Trump–can be accused on the record of forcible rape and suffer no consequences. Nothing ever happens to them. The Big Dog got deposed, I think. Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, pudding his pop where it didn’t belong, there to pound more than just cake, got off Scot free for decades. Men who are known to have traveled abroad on a custom private jet with a convicted serial molester and his barely teenage sex slaves are allowed to do whatever the hell they fancy, and in their public lives, no less. Joe gets to put his hands wherever he damn well pleases. 

Nothing happens to these creeps. Nothing ever happens. 

Here’s the mindbending part. 

My parents both found Mike Mersky sleazy, shifty, and abrasive. I have never told them about what he did to me, because I always assumed they’d blame me and don’t want any unpleasantness over that bullshit. They didn’t need to hear a thing about his being physically aggressive or menacing for them to dislike him for chronically being a greasy prick. 

What do they tihnk of Joe Biden, then? He’s restoring decency to American politics. He’s restoring the rule of law. He’s a unifier, not a divider. Whatever he did for the banks, it wasn’t as bad as Trump. Whatever he did to make life hell on the vulnerable poor in neighborhoods he flooded with jackbooted cops enforcing newly draconian laws, it wasn’t as bad as Trump. Whatever horrible things he’s trying to od to this day, he is in no way as bad as Trump. 

It’s so dispiriting to hear people who always distrusted a shady sleazeball rally around Joe Biden, of all ghouls, because he’s a man of decency. How could he be a rapist, a molester, a groper, a white supremacist bigot, a fascist, an armchair jailhouse slaver, a superintendent of mass debt peonage, or even a dementing weirdo? For fuck’s sake it’s because he’s proven to be all of these awful things. Yes, he’s that bad.

I’ve heard “decency” more this fall than I heard it over the five or ten years prior. In tandem with the full-blast firehose of idpol the centrist elements of the chattering classes have been blasting on us since the election, they keep repeating that Joe’s decent, a man of decency. Audio and video of him from THIS CALENDAR YEAR show him lashing out with terrible indecency: Go vote for someone else then; you’re full of shit, a horse’s ass; meet me outside; you ain’t black. If the average A-List figure were carrying on like that, it would be all over the news all the time. Look at how they react to Trump. Instead they just flat-out make shit up about Biden’s character and repeat it ad nauseam.  

The idpol this fall is like nothing I’ve ever witnessed. I expect some gross idpol from the MSM, and certainly from the hopeless veal pen inmates who kiss up to PC Principal from the inept margins of academia, but the Celebration of Diversity they’re throwing in observance of the current interregnum is a world of its own. NPR has had days with multiple items about who of what communal identity has been nominated for what. Meanwhile, the Biden transition team’s nomination process has crashed on launch, disintegrating into a rubble field of corruption and dysfunction. 

What’s happening here, as has been happening across so much of mainstream American life, is that words mean everything and actions mean jack fucking shit. We saw this in a bad way in the pathetic dispute, still under litigation in some quarters, over Trump’s Pussy Comment. The real problem with this publicly accused rapist and unannounced girls’ dressing room visitor is the time he bragged about his louche sex life to a giggling Billy Bush. One of the least credible forms of self-incriminating testimony imaginable is a salacious locker room story for a trust fund dipshit with a celebrity gossip show. There’s no positive, intrinsic reason to believe that any of it is true. Trump habitually lies about all sorts of things to make himself sound successful and brash. 

Even if it’s all true, the troubling thing about the public reaction to Storytime with Billy Bush (again, how are these characters real people?) fixated on the pussy part. Very little agonizing effort was expended denouncing him for bragging that he “moved on them like a bitch” or his explicit claim that he did not ask permission or look for any expression of comfort or consent. What these hysterics feel so deeply about (as he said) is that the future president used common street slang to brag about his promiscuous sexual habits. He used the same word the vast majority of American adults use for the vulva and the vagina when they talk about sex in private.

The pussyhatters’ thinking is more confused yet. Few of them object to the general coarsening of public life with loud sexual language and imagery, which is unmistakable in many places. Genuinely conservative religious voters who sincerely want talk about sex to stay tactful and private quietly facepalmed when they heard that naughty tape from the Republican nominee for the presidency. Pussyhatters skew the other way, ridiculing the religious right for being prudish and repressed (about most of the avowedly conservative “values voters” in this country they have an unfortunately good point).

What they find so objectionable is that Trump, specifically, used that word. It gets even dumber (does it ever not?), because very few of these hysterical performative feminists objected to Trump’s ostentatious public coarseness when he was peddling it as a celebrity developer and television cosplay executive. The pushback against Trump’s obnoxious antics in the eighties was marginal and ineffectual. The pushback against The Apprentice was EXTREMELY marginal. It was impotent. I was around normies all the time. The only people who even tacitly or tangentially criticized “reality” television were a handful of lefty eccentrics and conservative Benedict Option types.

Then Trump ran for the presidency. He ridiculed politics as self-serious bullshit, humiliated Jeb!, insulted the full slate of movement conservatives on the debate stage, and stood up against immigration and for a reinvigorated industrial policy. All of a sudden he was unconscionably coarse and dangerous. Tens of millions of diehard Democrats who were basically okay with however nasty he was on TV as an apolitical celebrity, including quite a few who enjoyed it, were appalled that he dared speak ill of hard-right ghouls who should have been choked out by furious constituents the first time they workshopped their evil schemes as members of the school board.

This is what centrism gets us. The runup to the election was saturated with deafening campaigns to rehabilitate the very worst Republicans the moment they tested the waters as Trump critics. It’s surreal.

There’s no actual principle to this shit. It’s gone with the wind by the time W. and the gang get rehabilitated. God knows we’re still entangled to death in the desert, but Trump sometimes expresses a keen interest in winding down the desert wars and bringing our boys and girls home for good. Of course the bloodless chickenshit nerds who got us into that ruinous bloodbath in the first place hate him.

The deep story behind the pussyhatting outrage, the movement conservative-Third Way neoliberal alliance’s annoyance over Trump’s distracted wanderings through fleetingly but impressively coherent interests in left populism, the neoconservative objections to his sporadic desire to bring the troops home, and the constant lectures from the Intelligence Community (which did not exist as a formal public concept prior to his 2016 campaign) is that Trump is out of his lane and out of line for expressing political opinions. Nobody gave HIM permission to speak! Nobody gave HIM permission to run for office!

This is why so many people complain that Trump is declasse and his base is exclusively the white working class. The elite and subelite factions so upset by his presidency are uncomfortable with working-class agitation of any kind (because it threatens their wealth, privilege, and power) and hurt that other educated and moneyed people have in-your-face dogshit reactionary politics, not the usual “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” centrist moral evasion or mild-mannered movement conservative politics amenable to centrist Democrats (because that means they have class peers who will never go to the dance with them). Biden’s nomination and election are a soul balm for these insufferable nerds. His victory over Bernie and that whole rabble of downwardly-mobile class traitors and the unwashed generationally poor is soothing lotion for their bunghole.

This is what they mean by decency. They love Biden because his election restores the sacred reservation of high office for careerists who pay their dues (payable out of the US Treasury) and toe the centrist bipartisan line. It resubordinates the rabble to their centrally-approved political betters. It’s easy for them to ignore Delaware Brain Dribble’s repeated foultempered outbursts, expressions of deepseated bigotry, condescending contempt for the acute needs of ordinary Americans, and episodic overt senility because they’re brainwashed and insane. It’s easy for them to become and remain convinced he’s better than Trump: less of an asshole, not an asshole, less of a rapist, not a rapist, I mean, gosh, really, there’s nothing wrong with him for being physical sometimes, he’s just a stutterer who puts his foot in his mouth.

They object to Trump for being too human for politics: too passionate too emotional, too vulgar. His off-color comments are retroactively problematic because he had the nerve to intrude, agitate the undesirables (i.e., the poor crackers they insist are the full extent of his base), and make the lanyards and professional chatterers look like exactly the joyless dorks they are. Never mind that he spent his whole career prior to 2016 bragging about dicking bimbos; one is shocked that the President would speak and comport himself in that low manner.

At the same time, they celebrate Biden for being the genuine human we need in the White House in these troubled times. He’s down-to-earth, he’s poor for a career Senator, he has working-class roots, he’s liberal, and ad nauseam with the bullshit and lies. He’s definitely rich. His parents were white-collar upper middle class by the time he started high school. No attentive, honest obsever would ever make him out to be a poor simple country lawyer whose daddy worked in a wildcat mine.

Mind you, they don’t mean sexually human. That little something-something with the Defense Secretary’s wife didn’t happen. He doesn’t grind she-bikers on his lap in front of their husbands. He doesn’t sniff little girls’ hair. Or if it does, it’s a nothingburger. (Centrism is braindead straight down to its catchphrases.)

This is shit that would get an ordinary man throttled in a church parking lot or beaten to death in a bar brawl. The rules are different for grandees who are guarded by dedicated squads of crack federal agents standing by within lunging distance whenever they leave the house. A man would get tackled or shot for reclaiming his wife from Joe Biden. When a man has that level of protection and publicly, repeatedly makes moves on women in front of their husbands,who are painfully aware they cannot safely do a thing but outwait, that man is not decent. He shows what he is. He’s a predator.

Back east, I used to run with some frisky chicks in MontCo and Manayunk whose boyfriends didn’t mind if they danced up on me, and I on them. Shit, Burmila, I used to have it. Guess I still do, after a fashion, but good God I’m in here writing this crap. One of the chicks was Irish. Her boyfriend was super chill about it, not cucked, just laidback. Two others, both of them Italian, were both dating low-key weird and messed-up Jews. The one chick was the distant, hella crazy kind of Italian. The chubbier, more approachable one named her ugly-ass tomcat after me. That cat was like if you put G. K. Chesterton in a fur suit and then ran him through the warp setting on FaceApp.

It was still an honor.

There’s something wrong with the Italians, but we knew that. Point is, we basically maintained the normal give-and-take that normal people maintain in normal interactions and relationships. (The Insurance Schmuck was how I knew these people, so it was a small miracle.) Nobody showed up with the Mormon answer to a rapper’s entourage and threw his weight around all night. I sure as hell didn’t.

It’s perversely encouraging to consider that a fair chunk of Biden’s coalition only thinks it admires him for his character. The last thing good property-owning liberals want to do is admit that they vote as property owners, not liberals. As I’ve said before, it’s refreshingly apsychotic to get the feeling that the shitlib booj are voting their interests, not acting on an eanest terminal obsession with the tiresome Schoolhouse Rock shuck and jive about civic values.

This shit is why GnocchiWizard encourages his followers to walk away from politics and focus on art, on making the world a more beautiful place. Does this essay count? I feel less brainscrambled than sometimes from The Craft, so there’s that. We’re all just crying out into the void, into the wilderness or some shit. But we still have prayer, just like Jesus. We still have the prayers handed down to us. We can still pray for our politicians. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us against that shitty creep. We didn’t order that. Return to sender.

You think I’m kidding. I wish I were.

The civil liberty to dine in at Denny’s buck naked and smear stool on the stool

It would be instructive, and most likely encouraging, to see what communities beset by Covid-19 could do just with mask use. Chinatown in San Francisco is a piss-poor neighborhood with large numbers of residents living in crowded SRO’s. Its infection rates are some of the lowest in the United States. Chinamen wear masks.

That’s what happens when a foreign enclave operates on a longstanding set of cultural norms oriented towards good public and personal health. The Inscrutable Oriental covers her face. The gaijin can have very little eye contact, as a trick.

The key here is that the mask compliance comes from internal peer pressure. Do honored elders riding the 1-California without a dozen words of English between them give a damn about what some rich white bitch thinks about the faddish public health measures? Of course not.

The Mexicans take the same path to a very different place. We might call them a different kind of dirty. Goodness gracious, Dora the Explorer never taught our children to say such awful things about the maid! How dare one? Dad’s banging her! Down in the crowded parking lots, out for some prayer time–look, Siegler, they may be Hispanic Latinos, or they may be Latino Hispanics, or they may be Latinx Hispanx, and this obviously has something to do with what it’s like to live in a plywood shack without indoor plumbing heaving watermelons into a truck for condescending landed Armenians–but in any event, you can see them there, on Saturday morning; they hold hands, stand up, and sing about what it’s like up there.

Given the current circumstances, I’m more inclined to be concerned about what it’s like down here, where I find myself the only masked party in all too many crowded public buildings. If syphilitics were walking around in supermarkets unpredictably splooging straight at other shoppers’ bussies with firehose force, I’d want them to wear pants, and I’d goddamn fucking well wear pants.

Did I mention that sex education in the United States is really bad? That it’s haphazard, squeamish, and disingenuous? Explaining masks as condoms for the face doesn’t work on those who have internalized ridiculous misinformation from sexual busybodies about how condoms don’t work.

What the hell do we expect Mexican peasants to think about any of this? Yanqui scolds want to limit their family formation but also want them (tacitly, tacitly!) to remain a reliable supply of scab labor. America, as Americans conceive of it, is squirrelly about giving them a civic stake, again because prompt naturalization in full would scotch the cheap labor deal. Do they really want to listen to a bunch of rich Dawkinsbots who suddenly care about their health as a likely disease reservoir endangering the White Community tell them to walk around in public wearing surgical masks? “The eugenecists don’t want us getting them sick because we live in poverty to feed them, sweetie.” Hoo boy, that’ll go over just great.

Encouraging foreign customs means suffering from foreign customs. There isn’t an option here to pick just the good stuff (cheap, meek help; taco trucks) and leave the bad stuff (The El Centro Center of Respiratory Excellence). This ain’t the Golden Corral. What the elites are insinuating here is arrogant and crass: Oh, we wanted you to breach the rules by coming here and putting up with housing that never met code, but we NEED you to follow the rules now that OUR health is at stake!

Yeah fucking right.

That’s the thing about the puritanical health cult. The lower orders can smell puritanical scolding before they can see it. There are usually two things that make Brahmins suddenly care about the health of the inferiors they consign to naturally unhealthy lives. One is their own superiority complex. Positional flexes require relative positions. The other is pissant defecit hawk concern-trolling of the public budget. They don’t want to pay modestly higher taxes to help the less fortunate live healthier lives without coercion, so they impose sin taxes on soda and cigarettes to cover the gaps between Michael Bloomberg’s actual and proper tax burdens and to give the little people “nudges,” such as the Mayor might enjoy off the platform and into the tracks on his celebrated subway ride.

Any of the rest of you white motherfuckers wanna get under the train for free?

The simple, elegant explanation for much of the baffling psychology of American politics is that people hate being condescended to and bossed around. College-educated centrist normies pretend, rather unconvincingly, to find it acceptable and justifiable, if not enjoyable. In point of fact, a healthy society would deal with Cass Sunstein by repeatedly stuffing him into a locker. How’s that for a “nudge” lol bitch. Is it so hard to grasp why there’s popular resentment of a socioeconomic regime based on nothing but nagging, indoctrination, surveillance, and coercion? Anybody normal and sensate would be livid.

The Rona would have taken and would still be taking a very different trajectory in the United States if the average American weren’t chronically exhausted and on edge. I can’t prove it, but I guarantee it. We eat terribly, at once too much and too little. We’re chronically short on sleep because we’re expected to work like draft horses all the time, regardless of how much work there actually is to do, and in ways that strategically leave crucial work undone. (See the poor state and limited extent of our rapid transit systems.)

Living in the United States is its own crushing cognitive load. Our medical system is designed to Shanghai patients into life-ruining debt if they get sick. Our health insurance schemes are insane: baroque, designed to divide rich against middle against poor, designed to mentally and emotionally ruin patients with gratuitous paperwork, and generally useless, even under the ACA. Every American lives in chronic fear of violent street crime at the hands of our unaccountable police. (I don’t believe for one second that Blue Lives Matter loudmouths are truly comfortable around cops. An unspoken but major reason for their boorish extremism is a deeply repressed desire to flatter a violent armed gang into turning its violence against anyone else.) Our hiring managers and line supervisors are exactly the power-mad busybodies who should be last in line for authority over others. As with the police, everyone in the country knows this but few dare admit it. Many won’t even admit it to themselves.

Everything about this nightmare is the profile of a society that will inevitably do a horrifically bad job of mitigating contagious disease. Indeed, before we suffered the Rona and did so little about it, we allowed diseases including hepatitis and tuberculosis to spread unconfronted among inmate and homeless populations. The officially, if tacitly, sanctioned conditions in our prison and homeless encampments are manifest threats to public health for the civilian population at large, not just deliberate atrocities against a vulnerable scapegoat caste. The spread of respiratory diseases and HIV from inmates to unwitting noninstitutionalized civilians via guards is inevitable. In coarse terms, guards and inmates bang each other. They breathe on each other. It’s somewhere between naive and delusional to expect Americans, of all peoples, to get a grip on our congregate institutions and put a stop to that shit. We can hardly (ooh, a clue!) get our own dumbasses to use condoms.

This isn’t a society that’s just funny around the edges. There’s nothing harmless or endaring about this. It is not incidental dysfunction. Objectively, it is systemic, catastrophic mental incapacitation. I’m absolutely serious about this. The mainstream American population is too mentally overwhelmed to think critically about this shit and make reasonable decisions about how to respond to it. The intellectual, emotional, and psychological burdens of coping with, shall we say, this American life on a day-to-day basis put us in a position as bad an any country on earth to respond adequately to a pandemic, and also our ruling institutions are systemically corrupt.

Considering the scandalous clusterfuck that passes for normcore in this sick country, we’re doing much BETTER than we should at dealing with this shit. I’m seeing people generally wearing masks around strangers in public and not making a stink about it, for masks or against them. This is encouraging. We were fated to suffer at least as huge a flood of paranoid and traumatic ideation, disinformation, self-absorbed grandstanding and scolding, and embarrassing woowoo from the Dread Ailment as we’ve gotten from it. Expecting better is like giving Rob Ford a fifth of whiskey at the close of business and wondering why there isn’t any left to take for one’s cough at bedtime. Shit, partner, I musta been drunk to smoke crack!

Our media amplify the stupidest, crookedest, most irrational voices. Desperate cloutchasers stumble all over each other in the cheap seats to ape whatever mental and behavioral health problems They are modeling for them. To paraphrase Colby Cosh, couldn’t you fucking DO something for a living?

*Smug Dril voice* No. Working for a living has been made precarious, degrading, and often not much of a living. It’s perversely rational to dig in with one tribe or another and post ideological bullshit for a shot at patronage. According to our national mythology, we want less of this, not more, but it would make our very worst people clutch their pearls and maybe yell if we broke HR’s back and told the furloughed to look for work or claim public assistance like any other loser they’ve chosen to culture for a paycheck, so we shut up and put up.

Who’s “us?” You tell me. How many people do you find making the Benedict Option work? I ask sincerely, not rhetorically. I only sound like a Socratic shitbag (in this paragraph, at least). We all bob around in the sea of everybody else’s bad decisions. Here in America, these decisions are, as I said, cultured.

That sounds like something we (“we”) do with coronaviruses at Fort Detrick. Hey now! #TooSoon. *Driling the whole goddamn way down again* John Mick Cane is alway’s telling Congress not to funding Amtrak, butt he care ;snot of funding,, thre “Anne Thracks.”

How bow dah. We still haven’t figured out how we cashed the ultrapotent weapons-grade anthrax ousside the suspiciously weak biosecurity cordon at the other end of 270 from the mailing addresses. Honestly, why are we concerned that Red China may have been up to similar monkey business just outside–for real–Wuhan? I mean, that would be no good, too, but it would have to get past US customs for direct innoculation of civilian constituents of a hostile power. In this analogy, our own Intelligence For Your Death services are the mad scientists, and we, the people, are the hostile power. Either the Chinese hosted the 2019 military olympiad in Wuhan to blame their dirty work on us, or we sent a delegation to Wuhan to blame our dirty work on them. If either or both are up to that shit, it’s good and goddamn well my stance that we are to scrutinize the bioweapons lab half an hour from where one of my best friends lives.

That is, our own.

The popular reactions are insane because the circumstances triggering them are insane. Things would be much more normal and comprehensible if we were facing only a pandemic. What we’re really facing here is worse. It’s more complicated and intractable. The same underlying sicknesses we’ve failed to treat, let alone cure, for decades–comorbidities, if we may–are with us more than ever, now that they have a runaway communicable disease outbreak as a channel through which to work their ruin. Before the Ailment, our job market, housing market, medical system, schools, and social safety net were all busted for those trying to use them. The effect of the Rona is to push these failed institutions over a tipping point into even worse states of dysfunction and evil.

The question, of course, is failed for whom. Are you forced to use these failed institutions? Do you truly think it’s bad that they have been failed? Is there anything the officials that sabotaged them into their current state can do to repair them, either by changing their own behavior in office or being forced back into private life?

Do you vote?

Take me for Shitty Socrates again, if you wish. For my part, I wish these were just rhetorical questions, and I were just being a pain in the ass. It has not been good for anyone’s grasp on reality to hear constant screaming at fighter jet volume to the effect that the Democratic Party is the American left. How the fuck does that work? Biden is a Democrat. So was Strom Thurmond. The Jefferson-Jackson Dinners that county party affiliates often host are not polisci roundtable discussions of the left-liberalism of either of those thugs, any more than the GOP today gives a shit about anything Lincoln had to say, or did not have to say from his back pew at St. John’s, since we were not the God he petitioned. [Insert gratuitous carrying-on about Intercessors for Protestants, to taste (sic).]

Washington warned Jefferson and Adams to flee from all political factions. Oops lol. That bit of counsel against monkey business sure went to hart! Still, the political alignment of Teddy Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Jesse Jackson (upon information and belief, a Clinton) opposite Reagan, Deukmejian, Wilson (bad vibrations, Pedro), Gingrich, and that whole gang made sense. We properly classified our right-wing psychopaths. We called them by their true names.

These days, Confucius say, Wow None rectification Such psychotic Very confuse. It started in earnest with the Clintonite-Blairite Third Way bullshit. It was easier to recognize Gropey Joe as a sleazy crypto-Dixiecrat throwback with Dick Gephardt on the scene. His Hairhat Widebottom Jimmy helped make sense of moderately liberal Republicans like Arlen Specter. Moonbeam, also a moderate liberal, was too far left to be a California Republican.

So what the hell is Kamala Harris? She’s a Wilson-Deukmejian Republican, duh. Homegirl ain’t got no need to cook with gas when she can nonfatally stew them and pull them from the crockpot now and then for discount duty on the firelines, but otherwise, that’s glaringly what we’re facing in our next vice president. I’m going insane to listen to the same freaks who have spent the last four years calling Trump a bearfucking traitor shriek that she’s the bulwark we all need against right-wing reaction. Cracka ya shittin me? Either they’re gaslighting us or they’re batshit insane. Or, /annoying little Mexican girl meme/, Why Not Both.

Wesley Willis was psychotic, but these cases (many such!) are not to insinuate that Wesley was the psychotic one. Vibing at 24th North and 24th West but knowing that it’s for the best to cut the outpatient behavioral health before you head up and out for San Diego is the genesis of nothing crazy enough for the Democratic mainstream to tolerate today, Aftab.

Normal constituents walking the genpop yards with something resembling critical thinking skills often mangle the details. Donald Trump is a trusty old Epstein associate, not an avenging angel waiting to swoop in on a child liberation mission with information that may lead to the arrest and execution of his associate Hillary Clinton. Bribes of $2k per chart to drylab Rona diagnoses doesn’t quite ring true for the corruption of our esteemed medical doctors. Where are the busty pharma reps? Where are the dinner junkets and the free pens? The classic fill-and-bill doesn’t require bogus diagnoses, just diagnoses. Patient’s eye were equally reactive and dilated. Please insert my usual review of systems.

What the Fauci fans don’t get here is that an embarrassingly inaccurate story can be a scandalously true story. It gets into the air when Mina Kim goes on air for an hour of publicly AND corporately funded conversation returning often to grievances that public disregard for the season’s ominous warnings hurts the feelings of doctors.

PPP, baby. PPE? Wha dah? Huh. We’re just keeping the focus on the things that matter. It’s the insolent individual’s fault that our extremely ill-equipped physicians and nurses are sick and scared, not the fault of the hospital groups nickel-and-diming them on N95 masks to satisfy their own boundless greed.

Surgeon-Quisilngs like Bill Frist and Tom Price are doing their best to bait laypeople into a bum fight with their own colleagues. Love too bee in the Medical Fraternity. It isn’t as cunning or successful as they think. It never is. As the most successful, they win the battle but lose the war. No matter how passionately unlicensed workaday Americans hate or resent doctors for being arrogant, incompetent, and spoiled, they know on some level that the student debt, “health” “insurance”, and hospital “nonprofit” rackets are the ones Shanghaiing them to death for being injured and sick. If they have problems with their own internists for misdiagnoses or terrible bedside manner, they’ll definitely have problems with shitsack social climbers drawing federal salaries to fly around for leisure on government jets or make insane speeches before Congress about how the last defense against the culture of abortion is the heroic effort to keep a woman who obviously has a life expectancy measurable in hours on life support because she’s one small miracle away from pulling a Lazarus trick. It’s pretty easy to direct attention away from banally mediocre doctors doing the yeomen’s work of medicine and back to the bigshots, where it belongs, by noting that the Terry Schiavo guy was a surgeon cosplaying as America’s neurologist and also a beneficial owner of a huge, hyperprofitable, morally seedy hospital group.

Eyy, now, same ting applies to you, Tony. Sayin’ Santa don’t get da cold aw da flu, ya coal dat medicine, pal? This ain’t Miracle on 34th Street, asshole. We can tell that we’re dealing with a cult when people who gush about Anthony Fauci as a scientific authority coo about how it’s cute or some shit for him to reassure our nation’s children. No. Absolutely fucking not. Either Covid-19 is serious or it’s a false alarm. The hysterics do not get to have it both ways. The chief of the main national infectious disease lab used a global pandemic as an opportunity to joke about how a tubby old sack of lard who exercises for 24 hours straight and sits around the rest of the year is immune to a virulent disease whose comorbidities include obesity, old age, and cardiovascular decrepitude.

Say it again: If this shit is serious and you’re in charge of explaining how serious it is, you do not get to joke around about it in public. You don’t get mulligans for burning public confidence.

This bullshit, like so much else about the official response to the Rona, and about America in general, is psychotic. This dude is the leading public authority on what he and his peers ominously insist is the gravest threat to public health in a century, and they’re all expressing their horror at the prospect of ordinary Americans spreading the contagion by visiting each other over the winter holidays. In the midst of his longwinded warnings, he abruptly pulled a Transformers mindbend from reality into fantasy and back by incorporating flagrantly misleading make-believe patient information into a children’s story about a mythical character amounting to a hybrid of Messrs. Grayling, Ross, and McFeely. This–mental health, do you call it? It’s delicious. We haven’t got a thing like it on any of the Offworld Planets.

It’s nuts. We’re badgered to listen in rapt reverence to the medical pronouncements of this man who is crescendoing about how we all need to cancel Thanksgiving the same week he’s on the record playing doctor about the perfect health and prognosis of an ancient beltstretching fatty from a series of Bernays-era Coca-Cola ads who rides around in the sky behind a team of reindeer.

This barely fit for Sesame Street in normal times, a few characters short of a cast. We could have a clumsily functional community with a bum, a bickering gay couple, an obnoxious hypomanic stress eater, and a moping depressive. Instead we have a cargo cult for children featuring a workhouse full of peasant shorties manufacturing toys for Deer Team Shoko Asahara. Obviously, though, the real problem here is that this year’s most prominent doctor carries on in earnest about this bitch-ass wizard crap like a kindergarten teacher and then snaps back into his usual harangues about how we’re going to kill Grandpa by having dinner with him, because he’s old.

There’s an ugly theme to these lectures on public health. Our officials are telling us, in rapid fire, what Christianity is, what Judaism is, what family life is, what friendship is, what dating is, what school suddenly is, what sports are, what children’s play is. We can’t control for how aggrieved citizens feel about mask requirements or dining room closures because these are proxies for fiercer upset about orders from on high to stay out of churches and whorehouses. Our rights of free association are abrogated by governments that can’t compel basic hygiene in nursing homes during an infectious disease crisis–or, worse, won’t. These are the authorities ordering us to stay out of each other’s living rooms and backyards. These are the ones instructing us to keep our children locked up indoors and allowed closely supervised play dates with peers from a maximum of one other household, lest they kill us all.

Everything is suddenly ritually impure, except for nursing aides who work in multiple homes every week, guards who are allowed overtime assignments on different yards from those where they work fulltime, squalid underclass bunkhouses, and every conceivable industrial setting that was already unhealthy and dangerous before the pandemic. These things are fine. Curiously, they allow parasites who already have a huge lot of money to save money and live better. Peasants filthy enough to deserve to shit in the same big bucket under a cubicle the size of a phone booth towed behind a barely serviceable school bus are out of sight and out of mind, as always until it’s time for some more idpol, of ambiguous ritual purity. Oops I just shat in a ditch and wiped my ass with my hand. As a Latina, sometimes you do that and then get back to work cutting lettuce and arguing with your mother.

Amen amen I say to you, the Lord of Leviticus works in mysterious ways. If we were serious about any of this, we’d thrust every landed Armenian but the Kardashians up against the warehouse wall daily until they gave their fieldhands proper flush toilets and time on the clock to use them. Instead we nod along to every horseshit story from some Dutch prick or off-white Nisei Farmers League fuckhead about how the Mexicans are the last people with an American work ethic.

We have ALWAYS known how to prevent or immediately remediate these threats to public safety and health: send inspectors in to raid properties that provide their employees squalid accommodations or do anything to keep them from taking bathroom breaks, including low piece rates, and send goons in after them to kick the shit out of any recalcitrantly filthy bosses. We don’t refrain from that because it’s coarse. We refrain because we prefer to reserve our police violence for the uppity poor, those without restrooms and the time to use them.

The authorities know what they’re doing when they reserve the enforcement of immigration laws for abitrary stochastic use against individual unauthorized immigrants and leave all relevant laws unenforced against employers who pose a chronic threat to workplace safety and public health. They may have known what they were doing when they dragged their feet about recommending universal mask use spring, in the face of swelling public pressure to stop lying about the efficacy of masks for the general public and finally provide the same guidance they’d been giving hospital staff all along. Regardless of the motivation–calculating and evil or just inept–this episode was a prolonged Chernobyl moment. It’s a miracle that it left a meaningful swath of the American public with any trust or confidence whatsoever in our authority figures.

It didn’t leave much.

The weirdness of so much of our current circumstances–the draconian Taylorist crackdowns on students and teachers under the auspices of online schooling; the sudden proliferation and fame of the same glitchy, hitherto unheard-of videoconference platform used for schooling, endlessly promoted as a wonderful alternative to visiting in person; the creepy deployment of the police state as a fnordforce to keep people out of well-ventilated, perfectly safe outdoor public opposite the open official license to dangerously ill-ventilated indoor private establishments to operate at will; the decreeing of interstate and even intercity quarantine orders as obvious CYA measures and public health theater; the scapegoating of religious congregations for a contagion that the officials denouncing and threatening them failed for months to contain–somehow leaves much of the rest of the official response looking inept, the ad hoc work of panicked idiots always caught off-guard, even with months of notice.

The most vivid current example of this ineptitude and panicked haste is the heady blooming official freakout about high-volume holiday travel over Thanksgiving week for communal family meals. Who the hell didn’t see this rush coming? Travelers start making their reservations for holiday trips months in advance. A quick look at the trade literature for the common carrier and lodging associations gives anyone interested months’ advance notice of the year’s travel trends. There’s a thick deck of wildcards this year on account of the pandemic, but all an official had to do was compare, say, one-month and three-month advance reservation volumes for the winter holiday weeks to ordinary weeks on either side. If there’s a noticeable spike, that means there’s a holiday rush coming down the concourse.

The rising volume, tone, and constancy of the warnings and pleas not to travel over the past week or so indicates that the authorities got blindsided, and bad. Any fool could have seen a holiday travel rush coming, along with gatherings for a feast day and seasonably cold weather ushering the congregations indoors. This wasn’t the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

I’ve been listening to NPR again, out of unfortunate tradition but also for the unexpected blessing of a two-cycle Freeman-Huizenga-State hat trick. *Reassuring Voice of the Witching Hour* I’m Michael State. It’s Thanksgiving, at midnight.

If only we all waited in joyful hope for the proclamation. The hysterical Safety Bear scolds have spent the whole week living at 23:59 Wednesday night, sweating bullets, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Their commentary has been getting crazier and crazier. They’ve been unraveling live on air, at first day by day, now almost hour by hour.

There were NHK reporters who stayed calmer covering the Tohoku tsunami, reading ground reports and government alerts on the fly over live helicopter footage of populated areas getting sea-scoured at highway speed while desperate motoists tried to outrun the wave for high ground and JR dispatchers lost contact with doomed trains. The trigger this time is popular defiance of the latest, shrillest public health guidance. The people marinating in this upset and worry enjoy some of the best healthcare and prognoses available in the event of infection. The threat alarming them to the point of hue and cry is almost entirely vicarious.

What stands out again, for those following or studying any of this shit in detail, is that so many of our authority figures are fixated exclusively on holiday travel as the determinant of transmission threatening to overwhelm our hospitals. To judge from the average newscast, the condition and management of our hospitals, nursing homes, jails, packinghouses, and other congregate facilities is irrelevant. That’s just the way it is, Hornsby. Could you just stop being selfish and not hug your grandparents to death this year?

Our betters have stooped to the point of proctoring the Marshmallow Test. Forego this one Thanksgiving and this one Christmas out of faith in all the Thanksivings and Christmases to come. It’s a baffling thing to beg for in the midst of months of wailing about the mounting death toll and the looming toll to come. Who’s saying Grandma will still be with us next fall now? The same grand hysterics insisting that her life expectancy is dropping from years into weeks, of course. This is logic,, and Science.

This is the exasperated pearlclutching tone of prissy, self-serious martinets who cannot believe that THEY will actually defy US. My God, they are actually disregarding our lectures. They are actually doing it.

No shit they are. Families and friends living in an avowedly free country are going through with our longstanding national tradition of visits over the winter holidays, this time in a year when we’re all being warned at impressively full volumes that we need to wait to live our lives because life is shorter than ever. If today was your last day, would you eat that slice of pecan pie? If you won’t, the governor will.

What we’re witnessing is a captain and his first mate clumsily hammering their ship back together with meat mallets while it takes on water and lists upside down. At least that’s how they feel as they shout after us into the void, demanding that we return to quarters at once. This analogy is getting pretty bad, Leon; I can hardly see where its going, even from the bridges.

The prospect of a collection of pissant nerds who ever really want for anything mistakenly assuming that their inferiors are plunging us all into an imminent existential crisis by prospectively taxing the strategically underfunded and understaffed parts of our healthcare system, the parts these same mandarins never use, is pretty funny. It’s a redux of the very salty waves of cringe and cope they’ve spent four years crashing onto apostates and uppity poors (but not their shitty Republican class peers) for riding the Trump Train or–hey yo!–the Stein Steamer. Maybe I’ll finally check this year’s H20 returns. Any of you punks sailing with me?

The incumbent grievances had to do with a messy gossip queen freestyle-beefing with other celebrities from his living room couch while filling his adult diaper and calling it policy. The new reason for the season this Festivus is private citizens going to dinner without permission. First as farce, then as farce again. We still aren’t doing anything to properly staff or stock our hospitals. Will there be an aide to clean you up when you shid your doo-doo ass? It depends.

I’m not taking about our thicc moist boi, though. Not this time. Meditating upon Strom Thurmond, Lisa Novak, and Shoko Asahara, I believe I’ve identified our First VolDiap President.

You love to smell it. Maybe I’m just shitposting about the man who is definitively our first Online President. He’s right about the losers and the haters. They’re upset with him for being openly performative in his official duties, leaving them in the dust as public speakers by being a seat-of-the-pants buffoon, and sometimes having fun at it. He believes in a society where there are jobs for dumb people, crummy students, people with PhD’s from crummy colleges. This is not the future liberals want. Trump is too liberal for them.

You read that right. Did I ever affy that this shit is not retarded?

Tangential to the additional hundreds of thousands who will or alternately will not come to a brutal and untimely end because you chose to maintain Michael Hancock’s family life, we’ve come to the promised land of government as Vanderpump Rules. The incumbent president, agreeing to vacate the White House but refusing to concede, officially proclaimed Thanksgiving a day of gathering and worship (lol wtf). An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States used a majority concurring opinion to clap back at the Governor of the State of New York that it’s liquor vendors and accupucturists who are getting us all sick unto death, not the Jews. Every one of these freaks draws a government salary. I’ve occasionally cleared minimum wage picking blueberries.

We have Illuminati or Freemasons or CIA or whatever taking advantage of the pandemic to circulate creepy code phrases like “Dark Winter,” “Great Reset,” and “Build Back Better.” Then we have Andrew Cuomo and Neil Gorsuch in a public standoff about what is authentic Catholicism and what is to be done about the Jews.

But again, who’s the liberal in this beef, and who’s the one we’re bound to hear on a live mic, fuming about kikes? Probably the one who went on public radio to say “nigger wops.” /Alan Chartock, miserably stirring a thimble of schnapps into a cup of chamomile tea/ Speak for yourself, Governor. You’re the colored fellow.

It’s hard to imagine how none of these ridiculous characters are able to convince the public to put on a damn mask in the grocery store when the sex education that might provide a conceptual framework for harm reduction is missing, replaced by purity pledges and other pious woowoo, and when the pro-mask authorities are carrying on with sob stories about dead people (over half an hour straight of Rona obits on the NewsHour Thanksgiving evening), statistically challenged panics about holiday travel, “curfews” when the prisons are still badly over their unreasonably crowded design capacities, bans on private gatherings of more than two households (whose actual enforcement will provoke homicides), and grossly unprofesional cutesy blather about a made-up old fat guy who never gets sick.

New Mexico still had its casinos open during a “mandatory” quarantine of arriving travelers from 46 other states. Many cities and states whose officials keep shrieking about the health and death tolls have their restaurant de jure open for indoor dining, or “outdoor” dining in enclosed plywood street sheds with some vents on the sides.

What the hell are we doing? I long assumed public corruption. A more elegant and all too believable explanation is that the governments need the sales tax revenue. *Taking a big hit of primo Duke City Crank and pulling a two heads one cube on the poor schmuck cleaning my face cubicle at the poker table at Isleta Casino* Love these health measures! Love this economy, baby!

A scrum of weird religious mummers bouncing around Brooklyn in top hats and overcoats but not masks aren’t the only ones breathing all over each other in our time of sickness. The only fucking idea we have of Irish culture in this country is low-functioning performative alcoholism. We have plentry of assholes who live to own the libs. Watching Lori Lightfoot, I can’t imagine why.

Scolding fits are easier and more fun than governing.

The cops know

It’s curious how so many violent weirdos are able to carry on with impunity right in front of the police: Dahmer, Pickton, DeAngelo, Wortman, Tsarnaev, Abdulmutallab. Concerned citizens can beg the police to investigate them in the disappearances of missing loved ones, for naught. Other countries’ cops can alert their counterparts through official channels with prophetic warnings of looming attacks: what he did here today he may do there tomorrow, and then, whaddaya fuggen know, Boston gets bombed.

Nobody could have predicted it. Oddly, the FSB did exactly that. That cat has an anger management problem, and he’s running with the beards back home. The Russian security services think he may mean his adoptive homeland harm? You don’t say!

In the Tsarnaev case, the feds iced the meathead principal, iced some contacts with knowledge or involvement, and are itching to ice the kid brother for being a patsy and a whipped little bitch. Gee, maybe one of the tens of thousands of G-Men who didn’t give a shit about what Tamerlan Tsarnaev thought about them because they weren’t his terrified little brother would have been in a better position than poor Dzhokhar was to stop him. I thot that was why we paid them.

Nah, face it, Jack. We know better than that. These things we cherish above Ruby. Up against the wall, signora, if you’ve got space for my book in your depository.

I got sideshowed on my way to the BART station today. Friday, three in the afternoon, jaywalkers everywhere, and some asshole was doing donuts in a stolen hot red Porsche on MacDonald Avenue. I was going to miss my train out of Richmond regardless, and all I got in the end was a free round tripout of Millbrae on Caltrain after one of our sister trains struck a car at a grade crossing around Hayward Park. The transit scene was fubar. The sideshow was the scary part. I stayed calm, and thank God our boy was competing in it as an individual sport. It could have been worse.

/Borat Voice/ My part-time wife chicksplained to me that sideshow cars are stolen. Duh. Always. Whaddaya mean, always? When Lisa Novak goes for a drive, it depends. That explains how fourth-generation welfare claimants living in ramshackle tenements can afford Escalades and Beamers. They come by them the old-fashioned way.

She knows about these things. My woman has an ear to the ground. She showed me a video of an all-night sideshow in Oakland, ten hours of uninterupted footage of caterwauling, twerking, donuts, and honky–I mean, honking. I can’t white see how that happened. You may not be able to say wop on NPR (Andrew Cuomo is!), but you are, indeed, allowed to say WAP. Schitt, Huizenga, oil beef hooked on anything but phonics. I saw enough of that video after two minutes. It was boring. YouTube has ten-hour cab videos of winter train trips across Norway. Still, the white boy can have a little doofus in a gold chain clowing around on the hood of a Mercedes, as a treat.

/BV/MPTW says the sideshow districts are no-go zones for the police. The cops don’t have the courage, physical or moral, to confront the mob. It tracks: they’re barely brave enough to answer the door at the cop shop armed and in full uniform. It’s like they say about the Crips: they’re blue, but they aren’t Blue Shield. It’s good to know that one of the infinite duties the police do not in any meaningful or, God forbid, binding way have is the duty to break up all-night hooligan takeovers of public streets using stolen motor vehicles. You know, #TeshTips, that kind of thing. Our police chiefs would fire Anirut Malee for keeping the peace, not the law.

One might wonder about the capabilities of our police agencies’ proliferating helicopters and BearCats and CCTV cameras and shit to interdict stolen vehicles on their way to sideshows. Shouldn’t these lavishly appointed outfits be able to use their fun toys to stop stolen cars from being driven to sideshows, say, on the probable cause of the registered owner who reported his Maserati stolen out of Piedmont affying that he did not give the current driver permission to drive it to 98th Street? Well, uh. There was a time a few years ago when the only type of crime increasing in San Diego was auto theft. The insurance companies demand their paperwork. There’s no paperwork for threatening to murder protesters for tailing the vans carrying their freshly blackbagged comrades.

Some of these pathologies are in fact particular to local cultures. There are police departments that fire bad cops. There are others that hire the shitcanned as lateral transfers. Constituents had to storm the city council chambers in Fairfield the other day to get their officials to do something about the serial killer thug they’d hired out of Vallejo, one of the homies with the bent points on his star.

In LA, where bitter, hard-aged young men with Huey hours came home to their pick of police work and television work, they do chases. Everybody wants to be a star, Fuhrman. They all want to be stars. Send me a goddamn picture postcard you blotchy creep. No matter how many choppers were on the trail, the LAPD’s ground patrols always ended up escalating the aftermath of their botched traffic stops until their erstwhile quarry crossed a dozen city lines, cleanly felled a palm tree onto an electrical line, and Russell Wellered a six-year-old into a Yoshinoya. Bill Bratton showed up from New York, took a look at this whatthefuckular bullshit, and ordered an end to it. His cops mostly complied, or so the papers said.

The East Bay does sideshows. They’re a team sport. It’s hard to say what it’ll take to stop them, but doing nothing ain’t it. This isn’t a case of standing down when some poor schmuck with a drug warrant gets triggered and flees a traffic stop for a broken taillight. It takes a force to defeat a force.

Or, as we discussed above, the cops could nip that shit in the bud. They’re already contact-tracing every kid in the neighborhood for gang affiliations, real or spurious. Of course, they could also do something about the murders, too, say, by intervening when somebody they know has beef is getting openly agitated. They could tell the hothead’s target to hop in for his own safety and ride out the storm. The violence isn’t senseless. It’s the inevitable reaction of feuds with weapons.

The cops know this. The overtime must be better on homicide than it is on patrol.

Any affluent city policed in the fashion of Oakland would recall its entire government within the year. The Palo Alto Police Department does not allow its officers to ignore car theft reports and fuck up their homicide investigations so they can focus on precrime augury on neighborhood kids’ Instagram accounts and violent jumpouts. No, asshole, you’re here to STOP street crime. Police departments in rich areas don’t have the latitude to blame violent crime problems on prostitution and drugs. They’re forced to investigate actual fucking crimes, not just complain that Kenneth Fitzhugh was loaded on coke and probably motorboated it off strippers sometimes.

That’s what monogamy gets you, boys.

Not for one second do I believe that the Richmond Police were unable to stop that asshole from doing donuts in front of me and dozens of pedestrians on a crowded city street in broad daylight. As we were told some months ago at a Gavin Gabbin, we’re decisions, not conditions. Our cops choose to be bad at both. Those who fire together wire together, and we can all see how our cops have become wired. They’re guard labor for capital, but they can hardly be bothered to do work for the insurance companies.

/Most civic Roger Schafer Spanish Space Program ground control voice/ I didn’t do shit to the bomb! I was cutting government waste!

D mock crass, see cunt in you (D)

Ayelet Waldman announced that she would not be donating to low-income heating funds this winter because too many of her neighbors in Maine fly Trump regalia off their trailers, then passive-aggressively reversed course and announced that she would be pretending not to hate the beneficiaries of her charity, which she was performing to the glory of Joe Biden. Since we’re here to talk about existential threats of a sociopolitical nature, verifiable or hallucinated, I’ll mention that I’m Jewish enough to construe Waldman’s vile outburst as a minor and latent but unsettling existential threat to me, but as they say about sex in Maine, it’s all relatives.

Besides, I try not to be a whiny little bitch. As Colby Cosh would say, uh, you’re some douche with a Twitter account. What are you gonna do, post cringe about me? Waldman’s is the language of a person accustomed to bossing other people around. In this case, the uppity were gentile Mainers daring to show the audacity of the caucasity while Waldman indulged in the audacity of cope. In other cases it’s black and brown people, but we try not to talk about that. We’re members in good standing of the Society for the Prevention of Kwesi Millington for Sheriff.

They’re throwing furniture all over Silverado Trail again. Juice do you copy?

Again, the Beans of Egypt are not why Trump is president, but also again, the cope crew are hella squeamish about blaming their fellow affluent for anything, aside from certain classes of Optimate attacks on the Brahmin affluent (see: Turner, Brock). I’m persuadable on a case-by-case basis that the poor voted for the Donald, but I demand evidence, and just as importantly I demand context. Like, how many laid-off green chain roustabouts living in single-wides out in the pine barrens voted for Trump versus how many shitheads with yacht dealerships?

Mind you, Boater Nation can afford its oil bills. There goes your precious leverage, rich girl.

There’s supposedly been some impressive monkey business in a number of Democratic boss wards this year. Believe it or not, I don’t much care about electoral politics anymore, which must be why I write so much about it, so either way, clean or crooked, the Shit Done Gone Down on the Streets of Philadelphia I’ve triaged to tertiary priority at best. That’s the thing, Milton. We might as well spend more time with our ladyfriends out in Moorestown and less time on that crap. We are going to have an atrocious presidential administration for the next four years either way. What gives me hope is the unpredictable but palpable energy for direct action to do what none of those four shitheads and their entourages will ever do in the public interest.

What I find most interesting about the election, rather, is that it’s so gross. Admit it: That’s why you come here. It’s just like they teach in Outward Bound. The mistake is to fight the tide of filth. Hang ten and you’ll ride it out. *Guy Hagi midnight forecast voice* See you out in the Pacific!

A great example of the season’s grossness, almost as bad as the Holy Roman Empire of “coffee,” the Pumpkin Spice Latte (so, so sic), is the Biden-Harris First Saturday victory party. Either you believe in norms and wait for the concession call, or you don’t and you don’t. Try to square the circle and you’re just Rob Ford insisting that he soberly smoked crack. Our big boy had more self-respect than that. He knew he was round, not square. The Norms Respecters of our Restoration Party wouldn’t even wait 96 hours to do their touchdown dance. They’re promising to govern us, so I say that’s a bad sign.

It’s an unfortunately appropriate time for some All-American whataboutism, given the greater Trump campaign’s efforts to fix the election, if less successfully so than last time around. Still, trump is 100% right not to concede until he’s had his canvasses, recounts, and audits. First State Skull Pudding and his executrix declared victory based on some wire service election calls. That’s like saying that I just got into conductor school because my sister-in-law says I know too much about trains not to apply.

Humor me if I’m in no mood to listen to any more horseshit from or on behalf of those two about how they too passionately cherish our norms and institutions and (God help us) processes to give one inch to Big Orange. And demanding a recount isn’t a coup. Where the hell do they come up with this hysterial nonsense? Does that huge soft loaf LOOK like he’ll barricade himself in the White House and bar the door against an eviction party of US Marshals? Chill out. All he’s gonna do is grandstand and whine. If the standing nonprosecution agreement (cool, another norm) is breached, he’ll flee to Dubai or whatever. Remember, from Japan’s perspective, Carlos is still ghosn.

Meanwhile we also have to hear insulting shtick about how Gropey Joe is working-class. Joe don’t know jack about ball bearings, strikes, and the riot police. That’s a working-class game where the cops might want to check the stables for some “spares.”

You may say neigh; I say /Monty Robinson field statement voice/ Yeah, that’s it. The kid skidded his bike on some marbles.

Whatcha gonna do when war is no more? Whatcha gonna do when war’s verdun?

We wait in joyful hope for the Blessed Eschaton, the day to come, not right now but someday, somehow, if you can hold fast to patience, Kroeger, we will climb aboard the Cruise Ship, leave it all behind, sail to Lahaina, and get into a street fight over a picnic table with a family of Micronesians.

This is how we allocate territory and resources more aloha. That’s almost an anagram for haole, whose insolent ass the Visitors Aloha Society of Hawaii will gladly return to sender, with or without an escort to the gate from the Attorney General’s office. One of the meanings of aloha is “goodbye,” yeah? She jus toldja, Pablo, yeah? She ain’t invited ya to da luau dis time, not to come here and pass da kine dacha coffin.

When push comes to shove, to wax delicate about these rude matters, the rules are whatever the hardest group of hard bastards to show up to the pig roast say they are. Indigeneity is an arbitrary, nebulous concept. “We were here first; who the hell are you?” is a reasonable position, but reasonable doesn’t carry the guns. Multiple indigenous tribes fight for control of the same patches of the Levant, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, with renowned results. Maybe they aren’t indigenous after all, depending on whom their ancestors charged in and beat to death first.

As Rachel Dolezal will agree, we’re all Africans. Pitcairn Islanders are mixed and at the same time inbred. They’re like Mainers, always thinking they’ll accomplish something by miscegenating with the Canucks. If you’re here, you’re family, and you might not want to be.

Back here on the Mainland, haole be talking the story all words-like about how we need to respect and obey our kupuna, notably including John Bolton. That Chesapeake Walrus was on NPR again, this time for his book (duh) but also to promote in-person voting, the civic pilgrimage of standing in line with the rest of the neighborhood. Why wouldn’t that pompous son of a bitch act like a quadrennial or biennial trip to the school gym to vote is the only time Americans ever leave the house to engage in the agora or the polis? Yeah yeah, we have off-year and primary elections, too; whole lotta folks showing up for that lol.

Voting is expressly and strictly a mechanism for the individual citizen to tell the government what to do. For example, a common constituent demand is “mail me my ballot, bitch.” In other words, I’m telling you what to do for me, and I’m telling you from home, asshole.

This is meta, but barely. We have to fight for our right to fight for our right to tell John Bolton to fuck off from the goddamn radio. That ghoul got over a million people killed for no good reason and tens of thousands more grievously injured or maimed, and there he is, using a book plug to complain that voters aren’t sufficiently reverent in how they vote. That’s what this shit is. It’s a procession. It’s a pilgrimage. It’s the fucking Stations of the Cross and the Camino de Santiago and all that shit, but for Norman Rockwell-ass nerds. Of course we should resent the government for pushing this shit on us. Of course we should vote the bastards out if they don’t put a stop to it and let us vote with maximum convenience.

John Bolton wants us to wait in line like dutiful pilgrims to express our will to our governments. I don’t suppose the lines at his polling places resemble those in, say, Atlanta under Brian Kemp, probably in large part because his neighbors think it’s ridiculous and demand ballots by mail. I fucked around at the County Center for a few hours on election day in March and watched traffic at the drop box, but I’d be pissed if Sonoma County told me to do that as a condition of voting, and I’m annoyed to hear John Bolton, of all Strangelovian horrors, being the faux-folksy codger who says that’s how it ought to be. Andy Rooney wasn’t behind a string of war crimes.

At some point, I have to wonder what isn’t meeting tonight to make waiting in line to vote feel so resonant. The Rotary? The Knights of Columbus? We do rather more of that than we should, as Americans, and we have precious little to show for it. The good Tocquevillean shit doesn’t work so well when Carnegie and Frick hire their Pinkerton goon squads. Standing up to such thuggish scum is how people wrest back their rights from tyrants. Queuing up in a parish hall like it’s the fucking unemployment office doesn’t connect cops with bricks.

We’re confusing upstream and downstream here, just as Bolton and the gang would have it. Since riots and other protests have been flaring up this year, we’ve been hearing more than usual about how much our public officials and other supercilious derelict busybodies respect peaceful protesting but abhor rioting, violence against police, and every other tactic that forces them to pay attention and do something. Of course they want a few handfuls of doofuses milling about on the National Mall in tricorn hats. Of course they want the pussyhatters, wearing a different style of tricorn watering the tree of liberty with a more peaceful flow of blood.

They started allowing us (sic?) to vote in the first place as a way to figure out how to keep the bricks in their place in times of popular grievance, i.e., by keeping the cops in theirs. It wouldn’t be unproductive to stage a runway sit-in anymore than it was unproductive of Richard Daley to send that streets crew into Meigs Field at half of dawn. Remember, we’re trying to get our way here, not express fealty to officials who can’t be bothered to care. *Most civic antigentrification Roger Schafer voice* I didn’t do shit to the dozer! I was cutting concrete!

The same tyrannical impulse drives all the scolding our Oaf of Office caught a few weeks ago for calling our war dead losers and suckers. The war dead he caught the most flak for disrespecting were from the First World War, the War so Great they didn’t try to plan for one greater. In other news, Francisco Franco is still dead.

I’m unaware of Americans of any importance making a patriotic stink about the Grand Army of the Republic in my lifetime. This is in stark contrast to Vietnam, although somewhat oddly not Korea. In effect, Trump holds the majority opinion on honoring our WWI dead, specifically, that it’s unimportant.

The namecalling doesn’t play as well in Peoria. Constituents who support Trump’s effort (lol sic) to get our boys (and girls!) out of the desert may well take offense to hear their antiwar president speak so contemptuously of war’s victims in the United States Armed Forces. Again, though, the doughboys he was dissing have been dead hella long, and the media shot their load on the story by focusing on Trump’s disrespect for our irrelevant war dead from the trenches of the Western Front and not on those who didn’t manage to run through the jungle.

As obnoxious or offensive as our Thicc Moist Boi’s private commentary may be construed, it was heartfelt. He genuinely and personally believed that the cemeteries weren’t worth visiting. The shitheads who piped up about his disrespect for our war dead don’t care about our war dead themselves. Many of them obviously treat military personnel, dependents, and casualties with dripping contempt. They did the same thing here as always. They seized on the latest bullshit controversy to impugn Trump’s character because they resent him for being a messy bitch from Queens who lives for drama. People of his character should not usurp high office, they fume.

What they mean by character, of course, is poor manners. Most of his predecessors were men of shockingly bad character. It’s just that they cleaned up well and the Donald does not. SuperZIP gaslighting victims now esteem George W. Bush, a man who respected our troops enough to get thousands of them killed in a war he started on false pretenses, with the main effect of destabilizing a country whose strongman the Blob hated for some reason, even though he was one of the less hostile officials in his region. Fuck off if you think I’ll grant that cokehead failson the good repute of caring about the military personnel under his command. He cared about them as much as he did the victims of 9/11. *Suprisingly high-energy Jeb! voice* Please, collapse.

Donald Trump gets war in a way few of his recent predecessors have. There may be an idiot-savant element to it, but he has the good sense to recognize that it was disastrous of the US to intervene in WWI and a Vietnamese civil war. Framing the disaster in terms of the gullibility or lameness of the grunts who fought these wars is pretty close to the mark, even if offensive. If they’d refused to go, we wouldn’t have gone, because they were us.

The battlefields and cemeteries don’t really tell us what happened. They’re misleading if we aren’t careful. I’ve walked around Valley Forge and Gettysburg. They’re deceptively peaceful. They’re long cleansed of the blood and piss and shit and moans of death. We watch Ken Burns for some drumming, a quick spot of shooting, and another spin of that sweet-ass Ashokan Farewell. Gettysburg wasn’t like that, either.

An area I like even better than Gettysburg is the Catoctin Mountains. I’ve walked around the ruins of the Catoctin Furnace and read the interpretive signs. It may have taken a loser or a sucker to run the forge for the rich degenerates who owned it. It certainly did to work for Carnegie. It takes nothing of the sort to divert ball bearings to the riot police. Horsey go wheeee!

Donny Fingers cares about that every bit as much as he cares about Camp David. What good is it for golf? The fucking government owns it, so he can’t charge for accommodations. That loser Lincoln only has one Bedroom.

Camp David has been used for peace, though, and so, in bizarre ways, has Donald Trump. That’s one of the reasons he’s so hated in Washington. He won’t mouth their deadly pieties. He’ll mouth his own, of course, but not theirs, and hoes mad.

What is it good for?

Regardless of whether or not Donald Trump in fact refused to visit a WWI battlefield cemetery in France because the American war dead buried in it were “losers” and “suckers,” the story is hella funny. The Doughboys WERE losers and suckers for dying for that bullshit. We shouldn’t need the Donald’s insight to notice this.

Since we’ve now received it, however, either as true witness or as scurrilous fun, we get to hear every sanctimonious centrist Beltway chickenshit with an axe to grind about Trump’s constitutinal crises, prolific corruption, breaches of sacred norms, and messy bitch antics intone about how shocking and scandalous it is that our thicc moist boi, the Oaf of Office, would DARE speak ill of our fatally wounded warriors.

The Vet Respecters have logged the fuck on, to make sure we never hear the fucking end of it. Many of them look down on our current military personnel with casually homicidal contempt. Much of the scolding we hear about the need to thank them for their service comes from deferment wranglers and other loudmouthed cowards who use the children of their social inferiors as board pieces in a real life game of Risk. Much of the rest comes from noncombat personnel and veterans swarming the Pentagon and its contractor satellites doing God knows what–my guess, as always, is not a hell of a lot–under the hilarious conceit of national defense. Ask not how Broad-Bangin’ Jack can do you; ask how you can do your country.

Whether we’re enjoying the nonfictional or the fictional version, Trump hit the nail on the head about how cucked our boys were to agree to ship out and become Salisbury steak tartare in Greater Belgium to satisfy the egos of a bunch of titled German degenerates who were upset with their cousins. They were all related to each other, and few of them just once. The Habsburgs were an entire lineage of intensifyingly retarded Latino Rachel Dolezal. That’s the quality of people who were ruling Europe. Victoria’s son and heir Edward was a total ditz. Britain went to war for a belligerent rabble of brass band drunkards and one branch of a degenerate extended family where being a dimwitted failson good at nothing but boning Irish camp followers was no obstacle to inauguration as the head of state.

They would have crowned Elon Musk, Cartman, and Timmy in uninterrupted succession if they’d been in line for the throne. More than a few of them made the imminent Charles III look dignified AND handsome.

Spending months getting gassed in a shitty mud pit for any of them over some incomprehensible treaty obligations a bunch of kraut bigshots had to abruptly activate because one of their kin had gotten whacked by a no-name hunky really is cucked. The First World War was the dumbest fucking war ever fought: no natural resources in dispute, no moral objectives, shockingly ugly conditions on the front.

Anybody who deserted that horror show was wise and righteous. So is pointing out that there was no glory or good repute in sticking around, toughing it out, and getting dead at eighteen. There is indeed some corner of a foreign field that is forever suckers.

Whoever wins this November, Oaf of Office or First State Skull Pudding, we’re facing another four years of lectures from bloodless psychopaths and their equally bloodless asskissers about the need to respect Our Troops (just not those with criticisms of war), Rick Snyder, our other very worst Third Way-curious governors, the Intelligence Community, and a grab bag of other shitsnakes and servile milquetoasts. Our war dead are already props for various Strangelovian adventures; there’s no reason they can’t also be props for tertiary-syphilitic fantasy fiction about how President Bartlet always respected our servicemen (and women!). Cheerio, m’cunt!