Category: Agitprop

Birthday bash

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Flag on the play: unpresidential conduct, personally foul.

The last time I took in one of those shabby little traveling carnivals that prowl the nation’s strip malls and fairgrounds was back in the Nixon years, when Hunter S. Thompson and I were both spending a lot of time, arguably too much of it, completely out of our minds.

Fear and Loathing, Campaign Trail style
The more things change, etc.

Hunter was, of course, a pro, and getting good copy out of his trips, especially that long one spent covering the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone that turned into “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.”

Me? I was strictly amateur hour, and as two hits of mescaline sent me reeling around that dime-store Disneyland across from the old Rustic Hills Mall in Bibleburg my only creation was an unbridgeable chasm between me and my horrified ex-girlfriend.

I think she was my ex-girlfriend. If she wasn’t, right at that particular moment, she soon would be.

A half-century later I have absolutely no recollection of what I saw that so enthralled me. But whatever it was, I doubt it could hold a candle to what’s happening at the White House today, Flag Day, in the Year of Our Lard 2026. Especially since I no longer indulge in the various brain erasers of my youth.

If only Hunter were still around to give us the 411 on this shit. We’ll have to settle for what he wrote way back when.

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. … Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?

Words without song*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 40 Comments
“I got nothin’ here,” says Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

How many different ways are there to write, “This fuckin’ mook is 300 pounds of bellowing bullshit in a 10-pound Brioni bag?”

Beats me. I’ve read a ton of variations on that theme, even had a few goes at it myself, to no particular effect. Manhattan Fats and his Brooks Brothers bandidos just keep rolling merrily along, stealing everything that isn’t screwed to the floor, stenciling his name in gold Krylon on whatever’s left, and bombing the rubble just to watch it bounce.

It’s like watching a CBS remake of “The Maltese Falcon” in which Kaspar Gutman grabs the bird, the real one, and gets away scot free, while Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook announce their campaign for the White House, Brigid O’Shaughnessy gets a talk show and a book deal, and Sam Spade goes to jail. And we’re just supposed to sit down and watch.

Did I mention it’s a series, not a movie? On every channel and streaming service 24/7? And not so much as a tiny box of stale popcorn with a watered-down soda for the rubes. No fertilizer, no corn. Thanks, Obama!

Subscribe! Follow! Like! Share! CGI junk food in an A.I.-slop sauce. Eighty-six the side of fries. No fertilizer, no spuds. Thanks, Sleepy Joe!

It’s starting to feel like even the bots have run out of scrapes for this tepid potboiler. Take “It Can’t Happen Here,” “Idiocracy,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “It,” “Grapes of Wrath,” “Lost,” the final installment in “The Godfather” trilogy, and the entire Marvel Universe catalog (except for maybe “Iron Man,” which was really pretty cool), throw it all in a big-ass blender, purée the shit out of it until all the ingredients are completely unrecognizable, and serve with a side of Motel 6 toilet paper.

Are we all just hanging on in hopes the final season will include a riff on the “Godfather III” scene in which the Devil — like the rest of us, mumbling, “Awright, OK, enough awready” — finally cuts Michael Corleone’s strings, leaving him to topple out of his chair like the dirty old man Tyrone F. Horneigh falling off a park bench in “Laugh-In?”

Well … maybe that’s just me. And in any event, we should all remember that the rest of the mob did not perish alongside Michael.

*Apologies to Felix Mendelssohn and his “Songs Without Words.”

Tea by the pool

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
No diving.

It’s not summer yet, but that doesn’t mean I can’t crank out my little bit of bullshit on the patio instead of in the office. I mean, it’s 64°, just past 8 a.m., and there are a lot more hummingbirds out here than there are in there.

Birds of another sort abound elsewhere. Buzzards, mostly. The Benighted States have been at the polls again, hoping to find a few that shit gold instead of what we’re wading through at the moment.

It might help if we focused on finding a species that isn’t focused on eating our entrails.

A robin, maybe. One’s busily plucking bugs from the back yard as I type. Good, useful work, that. Many insects infest the American lawn; many, many of them. A hungry robin might be just the ticket.

Aw, hell, who am I kidding here? We don’t need a robin. We need a Batman.*

* Or a Batwoman, Batperson, someone who identifies as a bat, is transitioning to a bat, I don’t give a shit. As long as s/he/they kick ass.

    Today in hisssssssstory

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
    The devil you say. …

    Today in history, from The Associated Press:

    On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes as a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

    Also on this date: In 1431, Joan of Arc, condemned as a heretic, was burned at the stake in Rouen, France.

    Sorry about that, Joan. In a righteous world you would have lived to a ripe old age and this other would have been a fatty chunk of long pig sputtering on the grill.

    Invasion of the Circulation Snatchers

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
    A little trip down Memory Lane to The New Mexican, circa 1991.

    Since I’m not road-tripping this holiday weekend, what say we do a bit of time-traveling?

    Shortly after I joined The New Mexican in 1988, publisher Robert McKinney reclaimed that paper from the soulless zopilotes at Gannett. He’d sold it to them in 1976 on the condition that he would retain editorial and managerial control, but just two years later took them to court, alleging breach of contract.

    It took a while, but McKinney beat them like a chicken-thieving mutt, returned as publisher in 1987, and in ’89 reacquired the paper he’d first bought in 1949 for a cool half-mil’, but this time paying a slightly higher price: “his remaining Gannett stock, then worth about $33 million,” according to The New York Times.

    Today The New Mex remains one of the rarest of birds — a locally owned newspaper. McKinney’s daughter, Robin McKinney Martin, is the big boss.

    And once again a McKinney is getting set to throw some hands with Gannett — this time, down south, where those bandidos own and operate the Las Cruces Sun News.

    Now, I’ve not read that paper in ages. I do look at its website now and again, and every time I wonder why in hell I bothered.

    This is what the American daily newspaper looks like in The Year of Our Lard 2026: the journalistic equivalent of the walking dead. A zombie, full of canned “news” from elsewhere, edited and printed out of town, far from its readership, if any. Check the “contact us” page: Just three staffers listed there — a news director, a news reporter, and a sports reporter.

    Now check the contact page at The New Mex.

    One name you won’t see there is Julia Gentin. She’ll be joining The New Mex in July to work in Doña Ana County — home of the Sun News — as the Santa Fe paper’s first bureau journalist for southern New Mexico.

    “Yes, we’re growing our newsroom and expanding our coverage area,” writes executive editor Bill Church.

    It’s an ambitious project, and I’ll be interested to see how it shakes out. Santa Fe and Las Cruces are very different places, and The New Mex is not the acme of perfection. Neither is the Albuquerque Journal, likewise locally owned. No newspaper is.

    And speaking of zombies, I wonder whether McKinney — who died in 2001 — might be suiting up for the battle from The Beyond.

    Some Gannett drone once called him an “old coot” in a memo. Which was accurate. But I don’t think he liked it.