Category: Agitprop

Boom times

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Miss Mia in the sack.

A thunderclap yesterday afternoon startled Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who was curled up in her favorite sack, enjoying her eleventy-seventh nap of the day.

I did not tell her, as did Johnny Lundgren’s dad in Jim Harrison’s “Warlock,” “That’s God barking at you for being such a miserable little pissant.”

No, I reassured her that it wasn’t God, probably, or even the work of a (much) lesser (would-be) deity — say, Felonious Punk, commanding a few of his masked ICEholes to shock-and-awe us back to wherever we came from, or didn’t, whatever.

Even if fascism were to come a-calling at El Rancho Pendejo, Miss Mia should have nothing to fear. She’s a Russian blue, and since the Punk just blew a Russian, she should be A-OK with him and his goons. Cream for all my apparatchiks!

Now, me, I’m an Irish-American Red, so who knows where I’d wind up? Where would a Adderall-snorting asshat send a sober Mick scribbler with a bicycle fetish? A Boston pub to pull pints on St. Patrick’s Day? The International Space Station, to chronicle its “retirement,” slated for 2030? Couldn’t log much saddle time up there over the next five years, but I’d get to rip one helluva descent when NASA — if it’s still around — pulls the plug.

And Herself? Conscripted into the Punk’s platoon of librarians, I expect. Condemned to catalog the pestilential archives of fuck books, Truth Social screeds, and unpaid bills.

And she wouldn’t be allowed to shush any of his minions, who never ever give their festering gobs a nanosecond’s respite from telling the FreeDummies that Making America Great Again requires chop-shopping it into a Dollar Store knockoff of Pooty-poot’s Russia.

Troops to Ukraine? Hell no! But troops to DeeCee? That’s the real global trouble spot, amirite?

The best intel I can muster tells me that the enemy is bunkered up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Careful with the arty and airstrikes, lads, and try to avoid damage to the facility if it’s feasible — it is a National Heritage Site, but may have been desecrated beyond resurrection.

I mean, have you seen what these terrorists have done to the Rose Garden?

Full metal jagoffs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“HQ says there’s a woke art exhibit at the Smithsonian. Cover me … I’m going in.”

“Tin soldiers and dipshits coming.”

Thus spake Charles P. Pierce about the governors of Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia sending National Guardspersons to “help police” the crime-ridden hellhole that is* Washington, D.C., which escalates the performative bullshit to DUMBCON 3.

Charlie further notes that Philip Bump, late of The Bezos Post, has assembled an interactive map “illustrating all the places in Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina that are actually more crime-ridden than Washington,” yet somehow muddle along with nothing heavier than the local coppers.

Parody throws its arthritic paws in the air and says, “Chieu hoi! I give.”

* Or is not.

    Alien nation

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
    A Wall won’t stop him. Her. It. They. Whatevs.

    Ordinarily I’d be mildly excited about “Alien: Earth,” Noah “Fargo” Hawley’s take on Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial horror franchise come home to roost.

    But don’t we have enough real monsters down here already?

    A handful of corporations battling over the remains of a dying planet? Check. Gazillionaire techlords acting on their every whim without let or hindrance? Roger that. The nice robot is your friend? Oh, hell, yeah.

    Same goes for “Wednesday,” Tim Burton’s vision of the spooky daughter from “The Addams Family.” Steve Buscemi joins the cast this season as an educator with a whole Edgar Allen Poe thing going on. And while I love me some Tim Burton, Steve Buscemi, E.A. Poe and Charles Addams, not necessarily in that order, well … see paragraph no. 2 above.

    Our real-life spooks are hellbent on robbing me of my sweet girlish laughter, is what. The sonsabitches will do that to us, if we let them. I’ve had to add some old Dan O’Neill comics to my bathroom library to remind me ’twas ever thus.

    Dan O’Neill in the dock, unrepentant.

    Corporate swine, gazillionaire techlords, and the politicians who serve them deserve all the mockery we can muster and then some. Just ask O’Neill, who went to war with Walt Disney Productions Back in the Day®. Disney proved a remarkably humorless and implacable foe, for an outfit that made bank on the antics of a cartoon rodent and his pals, but O’Neill kept on slugging, a smile on his lips and a song in his heart.

    He lost, of course. But it wasn’t a knockout; the judges had to turn themselves inside out to declare Disney the champeen. And even in victory the Mouse was left coughing up a couple mil’ in legal-fee corpuscles.

    Forty-five years later, thanks to the Innertubes, parody, satire — and yes, outright mockery — can spread a whole lot further and faster than a handful of underground comic books, if we’re not all too busy clutching our pearls on our fainting couches. Follow the lead of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and “South Park.” Hit ’em where it hurts with the ol’ one-two — the hee and the haw.

    I don’t think Dan will be sprawled on his couch watching “Alien: Earth,” if only because it’s streaming on FX/Hulu, which is owned by — wait for it — Disney.

    Between you and me, I hope O’Neill and the other surviving Air Pirates are busy working up a fresh parody of our modern monsters. Are you ready for Mickey Xenomorph? Game over, man … game over!

    Melting pot

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
    Mom’s chili, a staple of my childhood. It’s good … but I prefer Pierre Franey’s version.

    I was idly cooking up a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili yesterday when some doglike portion of my brain not focused on the task at hand hopped the wall and came back with a bone for me to gnaw.

    It was the Fourth of July. I was preparing a meal of Mexican origin that Texas claims as its own (along with a sizable portion of Mexico) using a Frenchman’s recipe in a New Mexican kitchen.

    Mom’s recipe. You can see it’s got a lot of miles on it.

    This particular recipe was “fairly traditional,” according to Franey, and not so very different from my Iowa-born mother’s take on the dish, which dates back to the O’Grady family’s stint on Randolph AFB at San Antonio, circa 1962-67. But Franey’s version uses turkey instead of beef, with a particular season in mind — not the Fourth of July, but Thanksgiving, which is when his recipe was published in The New York Times in 1992.

    Franey’s journey to a quick, simple, and delicious chili recipe certainly took the scenic route, if we use his biography as our map. As a young man he left France to join “an impressive team of cooks” at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. When World War II erupted a few years later, he took another job — with the U.S. Army.

    Offered a cushy berth as personal chef to Gen. Douglas McArthur, Franey declined, saying he’d rather help his countrymen fight Nazis in France. Thus, after boot camp at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he shipped out to Europe as a machine gunner, rising to the rank of sergeant and collecting a Purple Heart for his troubles.

    After the war, Franey went on to work with Craig Claiborne on recipes and restaurant reviews for the NYT, and in 1975 hung out his own shingle there as “The 60-Minute Gourmet.” A decade later he was cooking on public television, too.

    Imagine that.

    What might an 18-year-old Pierre Franey encounter upon his arrival in today’s America? An immigrant … and from France? Taking American jobs? Willing, even eager, to fight Nazis rather than serve his betters in the kitchen?

    He’d be in a Salvadoran slammer before he could get his apron on. And without machine-gunning any Nazis, more’s the pity. If the kid could channel the Pierre Franey from that other timeline I expect his 1942 self would be astonished that 83 years later we’re fighting brownshirts in America as Lady Liberty hides her face in shame.

    Me, I’d still be using Mom’s chili recipe. Which is fine. But it takes a lot more time, and runs light on peppers and long on tomatoes.

    ‘Who’ll Stand With Us?’

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
    It’s a Dropkick Murphys kind of Fourth around the Dog House. Up the rebels!

    As Dropkick Murphys release a new album, “For the People,” frontman Ken Casey has a few thoughts about the big red pickle in which we find ourselves during our annual Independence Day picnic.

    Speaking with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Casey said he was shocked that so many people in his life fell for Trumpism:

    “My father died when I was young, and I was raised by my grandfather, who was basically like, ‘If I ever see you bullying someone, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you back down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”

    “I’ve just never liked bullies, and I don’t understand people who do. It’s really not that hard. I wish more people would see that it’s not hard to stand up.”

    So stand up with Dropkick Murphys and the people on this Fourth of July, and all the other ones, too, even after we kick the shit out of these bullies. And sing along, if you can keep up. Here are the lyrics for anyone who’s not fluent in Celtic punk.