cheese it, the cops!

sartwelliana, 2018

Some of my writing this year, especially for splicetoday:

Music: on my stereo and in  my head, a lot of the year was occupied by classic gospel, say 1940-80; gospel music as women's liberation, 80th birthday tribute to the great Shirley Caesar, country enters its postmodern era (2018 top ten),  hippie goddesses of the 1970s (Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur, Linda Ronstadt, Tracy Nelson), stoner country (Commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel, NRPS), Chrissie Hynde, best pop artist of the last 40 years, happy birthday, 'stand by your man'.

For whatever reason I didn't do a shitload of humor this year, but I did pen a stirring tribute to Philip Roth's obituarists. I tried to rehabilitate my tarnished brand with an apology to America.

I tried to sketch out my basic politics in a triptych: why i am not a leftist, why I'm not on the right, why i am an anti-authoritarian. 

Attacks on pc, identity politics, representation etc.: the dead end of demographic politics (wsj), dna and politics, kanye west and susan collins: shredded by intersectionality, "looks like me", 'researcher' announces stunning result: we're all the same, King meets Zuckerberg, pc entertainment as medieval allegory, bad words, the punditry of personal destruction, self-esteem and bauxite, Anna Deavere Smith and the ridiculous reception of Black Panther

Gender: conversion therapy isn't the cure for toxic masculinity (wsj), boys, we will survive, we old dudes should mistrust ourselves, holidays and gender

'Why They Suck" is winding down, but I got to michelangelo, harry potter, bill gates, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Serra.

Religion and spirituality: (see gospel music stuff, above), beckoning god from his fastness, i advocate the doctrine of original sin (nytimes), priestly abuse is central to catholicism .

Personal/philosophical excursions: fall in the south mountain fruit belt, weekend dad, a very short memoir, how to be original, how much distance?, review of james c. scott 'against the grain', george lakoff and the pseudo-science of neuropropaganda (wsj)

Politics, Trump, and so on: perjury factory, fuck me, i'm going to vote democrat tomorrow, apocalypse in the theatrocracy, re-narrating american history is an old persuasive tactic, american institutions have earned our distrust (wsj), two (or three) kinds of dishonesty, slavery, immigration, and civil disobedience, grooving on the world order in danger, america's intelligence coup, the domestic threat to american elections, american politics is filthy, polarization and the counter-factual crisis, how to argue with a young socialist (wsj), i want donald trump to hold me while i cry, politics and geography, children: our treasures our targets, trump and brexit as repudiations of technocracy

How Would You Draw History?

Asking for a Friend...Does Trump's Ass Make Him Look Stupid? Or Fat? Or Both.

 

An odd part of the fallout from the Facebook-Twitter-Instagram Bot investigation is that a lot of internet publications that depend on outside collaborators can't post various places like Facebook because their content won't pass the Decency Test. Veterans Today is one of those places, and they've been struggling to find the right formula to differentiate from old bad actors and new, possibly more bad bad actors who are a bit more politically correct. I guess that did us in at Veterans Today -- I think that our awarding liars "Motherfucking REMFs" for the extent and grossness of the reality may have been the proximate cause. 

Not to worry. Despite losing a lot of retweets and views and various things, we still exist.This is a new piece -- I confess that for someone with a seriously bent sense of humor and a tendency toward satire, the Trump administration is an embarrassment of riches. It's just impossible to write seriously using satire to make points while presenting an argument when you're dealing with this chiseling lowlife. I know that Maddox prefers some varions on Military Monk as a nickname pointing to his dedication, straight shooting integrity, and disdain for comfort and wealth. However, life with Trump for someone in his position probably felt a lot like self-flagellation with barbed wire. Somehow, it just didn't pass the smell test. So, he lasted a helluva lot longer than someone not a Military Saint would have. Trump would have had me at the Bastille Day ceremony. 

Anyway, one thing that has been a problem for me is finding the right epitet for Trump, one that mocks but captures his pieous side. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, belongs to the realm of stories where the hero is destroyed by a fatal flaw in his own makeup. Well, Trump is a nexus in and of himself of lots of fatal flaws. Did he ever give or get a blow job from Roy Cohn? Possibly. Knowing Roy Cohn well enough to have a personal opinion about the guy makes him unqualified to be president -- but that might give his base pause. You need to have a really well developed handle on recent American History to know what a louse Cohn was. He was a genuinely evil man; he died of AIDS denying that he had the disease or was Gay in public up until he died. He probably ran a bit of a gay cabal on Senator McCarthy's staff, which the drunken fool wouldn't have caught on to. He was disbarred for various nasty stunts like suborning perjury, witness tampering, embezzlement, and who knows what else...that's who he's referring to when he'd complain he wanted his own Roy Cohn...

 

I've given it a lot of thought, and had  settled pretty much settled on some variation of President Manatee, but realized that was unfair to sea cows. Then I heard someone say Trump is from Queens and I thought, yeah,,,and then Howard Fineman said something about his administration being the most corrupt government since Caligula. Well, I don't think it's close; I think it's probably worse. Of course, Trump hasn't married his horse yet after appointing it to the Supreme Court -- As Gaius "Caligula" Caesar did -- of course, we know that Trump is scared of animals, and I suspect that horses really scare him. And, Caligula did decide to invade Britannia and then had his Army beat the waves with the flat of their swords and fill their helmets with seashells to represent his booty, planning to display this on his triumph.On the other hand, there was the great parade debacle and the "guard the border against the caravans" nonsense, so...close enough. 

So, does "the Queens' Caligula work for him? Or does it make his ass look fat?