It’s been an expansive lacuna, I admit, but I have been caught adrift between two immiscible themes that inexplicably cohabit like Vanessa Trump and Valentin Rivera. To wit: what comes out of Washington is so outrageous that even though strident sardonicism is now totally indistinguishable from its own fodder, the President remains wildly popular within his coterie of rednecks, corporate welfare queens and school shooting enthusiasts.  The polity has become so inured to the myriad of lies and so deluded by the incessant labels of Fake News that the media sees no reason to establish the link between Mr. Trump’s overt racism and the criminalization of brown skin and kinky hair.   Heaven help us if there’s a real emergency because 911 phone lines nationwide are all jammed up by white folks calling the police whenever the darkies show up at a park or an Airbnb.  One may well expect this in Alabama, but it’s happening in sanctuary cities like Oakland, CA and all across the socio-economic spectrum, from the Waffle House to Yale University.

Equally confusing is the self-contradictory string of Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed.   Cabinet members and aides are lauded only days before they are burned, leakers are simultaneously disclaimed and excoriated, and sneak attacks are broadcast in advance.  What remained baffling even among the Daliesque signposts in this Bizarro World of Stormy McCohen was the President’s reference to a “drunk/drugged up loser.”   For days, speculation and denials caromed around the beltway, until, one afternoon, it became apparent that the Donald had conflated a New York Times reporter with the White House physician, Adm. Ronny Jackson.

Jackson, known to insiders as the Candyman, routinely handed out opioids like M&Ms on Halloween and when he got caught self-prescribing he forced underlings to continue writing his orders.   Frequently sotted on the job, he once had to be subdued by Secret Service agents while trying to break down the hotel room door of a female staffer. He crashed a government vehicle leaving an official function, and, at least once, was unable to render medical assistance because he was passed out drunk on the floor. Remarkably, none of this would have come to light had Mr. Trump not nominated the Admiral to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Thankfully, however, Jackson, like so many before him, has not only lost his White House gig, but he must endure the rest of his days a broken man, with the broad fetid shit stain of Donald Trump down his back.

Yet there remains, as has been the case in many of these sagas, something even more despicable if not sinister below the subsurface; last February, Alan Garten, a Trump Organization lawyer and Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard and White House employee raided the office of Trump’s longtime personal physician and stole the President’s medical records.  Despite Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ assurances that the smash and grab was “standard operating procedure,” the heist was clearly illegal if only for the lack of a signed HIPPA form.  As Dr. Bornstein lamented to reporters, “How would you feel if you cared for someone for 35 years, they came and robbed your office?”  Enjoy your shit stain, doc.

The million-dollar question, of course, is what precisely is the White House attempting to conceal.  The admixture of former Playmate Karen McDougal’s revelation that Trump eschews condoms along with common knowledge the President’s infatuation with Roy Cohn, leaves us conjecturing – especially since the Mrs. been released from Walter Reed Hospital for an undisclosed “kidney ailment” – as to exactly which dirty bits Melania might have inherited from the trail of porn stars and Russian hookers.

 

 

 

While the White House and the NFL alternate volleys of adolescent tweets and contrived anthem protests, I thought it noteworthy that tonight’s game featuring the league’s two most offensively named teams (Redskins and Chiefs) generated virtually nothing in the way of commentary.   Were it not for a rash of natural disasters, the news cycle would still be reanimating the events of Charlottesville and the attendant debate about our collective perspective(s) regarding slavery, the Confederacy and segregation. But doesn’t our nation have equal culpability when it comes to the atrocious treatment of Native Americans? The answer is probably “who cares?” as most of us have become inured to ever widening claims of victimization. We have lost our ability to register distinction or nuance under the barrage of blah, blah, injury and injustice, blah, blah, entitlement and restitution… blah, blah, blah.

Because we find ourselves in an era where political correctness is strangulating civil discourse, the only fertile soil for the seeds of pragmatism – namely, an ideological middle ground – has all but completely given under to the unrelenting polarization and demonization of modern American politics. Without hope of a resolution to any one of the polity’s copious ailments, we are left to vacillate between outrage and the snarky pleasure of exposing the most sanctimonious among us as charlatans and hypocrites. Recall Joe the Plumber, held up by John McCain as an exemplar of the Conservative everyman, a gleaming rampart against the burgeoning Socialism of Barak Obama. As it turned out, Wurzelbacher was not properly licensed or accredited to work his trade and furthermore failed to pay his taxes.

So now from the Left comes Liz Phipps Soeiro, the librarian at the Cambridgeport School, who refused to accept Dr. Seuss books donated by Melania Trump. In a letter to the First Lady, the librarian made several valid points about budget cuts and other debilitating policies championed by Secretary DeVos, but just couldn’t stop there. She went on to denigrate Dr. Seuss as “tired and worn,” and colored his artwork as “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures and harmful stereotypes.” It was then that the Internet disgorged Soeiro’s 2015 Twitter post celebrating Dr. Seuss’ birthday by posing in Cat in the Hat attire while holding a copy of Green Eggs and Ham. She has, in other words, the approximate moral authority of televangelists Jim Bakker (recall: a Cosby-ish drug and rape) or Ted Haggard (think: any number of gaynal creampie viedos).

The rain of bullets in Las Vegas will certainly revivify the gun control debate, which, predictably, will produce nothing but shouting and irrationality. Once again, the NRA tactic will be to go dark for a few months and then hammer on about something inauspicious the assailant did with finger paints in a day care center. Talking heads will clog the airwaves and social media with the same tired arguments and counter arguments, reaching conclusions both spurious and conspicuously self-serving. Given that Congress remains unmoved by assassination attempts on its own membership (Giffords, Scalise), we can hardly expect them to relinquish hefty campaign contributions from the gun lobby simply because school children are slaughtered in broad daylight (Sandy Hook, Columbine). Lawmakers care not that their ostensible heroes, policemen (Baton Rouge, Dallas) and military personnel (Ft. Hood, Washington Navy Yard), are no longer able to defend themselves.

Clearly, we need a fresh approach. What if instead of gun control, we merely legalize the shooting of gun owners? You know, just let them kill each other off. I floated this idea with my friends at lunch and one of them mentioned he’d read a book in junior high school that sounded vaguely similar. Well, then, I replied, what if the wounded were parked in wheelchairs along the sidelines of football fields where they would be forced to witness their mothers, wives and daughters getting sodomized by immigrants.  Refs would signal “touchdown” upon every consummation.  We could call it Half Time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google engineer James Damore was recently fired for circulating a treatise on the company’s intolerance to conservative thought. His missive built on two premises; that women, without exception, are less equipped to solve complex problems under stress than a failed rodeo clown who mucks shit at pony rides, and that the Right believes differences are inherent while the Left believes they accrue from discrimination. Democrats, accordingly, buy votes with entitlements. Republicans enrich their friends at the expense of the disenfranchised. While both are wrong, they are far from morally equivalent.

The same can be said of Charlottesville. It is true, as Mr. Trump noted, Antifa demonstrators didn’t have a permit, but they also didn’t run people over with a late model Dodge. The driver, one James Alex Fields, is a registered Republican dumbass that managed to kill the one white woman in a whole damn sea of afros. And as we learned during the Bachelor in Paradise sex scandal, we’re losing enough of our pussy to them darkies as it is. His plan, in other words, backfired.

And there’s been a lot of that lately. Anthony Scaramucci thought he could deracinate his enemies from the White House by calling them cock-suckers: instead he lost his job, his wife (read: half his net worth) and the tax abatement on the sale of his company all in the span of one day. Ten undocumented Mexicans thought they were getting a free ride to WalMart only to be braised to death in the back of a tractor-trailer. Indiana Republicans put up a Facebook page to collect Obamacare horror stories, but were overwhelmed with testimonials of how the ACA had saved constituents’ lives. And in a fun-house-mirror kind of warped symmetry, Trump’s firing of FBI Director Comey as a means to ground the Russia investigation is precipitating his impeachment in the same way that Bill Clinton’s entreating then Attorney General Lorretta Lynch to drop the inquiry into Hillary’s use of a private email server lead to her defeat.

But let’s be clear: backfire is but a subset of irony. The latter describes any event that seems deliberately contrary to expectation, while the former is restricted to those episodes that boomerang specifically against the originator. For example: the Ohio State Fair Fire Ball splattering 18-year-old Tyler Jarrell onto the concrete shortly after inspectors gave the amusement ride the thumbs up is ironic. Zed getting his nuts shotgunned off in Pulp Fiction as the climax to raping Marsellus in the pawnshop basement is a backfire. Got it?

Back to Charlottesville: There were 2 million fewer African American voters in 2016 than in the prior presidential election. In the key swing state of Wisconsin, the black voter participation rate fell from 78% to less than half over the same span. I guess they felt as if they didn’t have a dog in the hunt, but the result is that they are now being hunted like dogs. Both sides blame the escalation on police indifference during the preliminary fistfights and skirmishes, but the cops, having strained to not antagonize either party, are now themselves in the crosshairs. And while the animus for the gathering was to forfend the removal of a sculpture of Robert E. Lee, the melee has only accelerated the nationwide purge of — in Trump’s words — the “beautiful statues and monuments” that glorify the Confederacy.

While I concede that these symbols represent a vital and enduring piece of American history and should unhesitatingly be preserved, it might be best to gather them all up from our multiethnic public spaces and truck them down to Southern Appalachia. Imagine, then, one giant Dollywood-like park among the verdant rolling hills where a lifelike figure of George Wallace will block the entrance, endlessly repeating his infamous “segregation forever” speech. Once inside, patrons can raise the rebel flag, eat funnel cake, or piss on the thousands of Obama urinal cakes cascading down Splash Mountain. But don’t look for any egalitarianism here because while everyone gets a Congressman Buddy Carter (R-GA) bumper sticker that says, “Snatch a Knot in Their Ass,” only those wearing a Make America Great Again hat will be given a job at Google.