A successful parasite, moving from one host to another.
Who would’ve imagined that Lindsey Graham would beat The Turtle to Hell?
Not me.
Of course, Mitch McConnell may already be down there waiting on him, with dibs on the top bunk at the Lake O’ Fire Lodge. The usually reliable sources remain as silent as the grave.
Above the sod we hear all of the usual chin music about Graham’s alleged statesmanship, independence, compromise, influence, bipartisanship, and so on.
But I think Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo gets it just about right when he writes that “there’s another feature of his personality and political career that is key to understanding the man. He always needed a daddy. Or let’s say a political leader. A top dog.”
“That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” as HST would say. Say hello to the new boss, bitch. Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay.
Emperor Fullashito no longer knows the difference between Iran and Japan.
I believe the sushi has done slid off his barbari.
Maybe he shish’d his kebab by having unprotected buttsex with that Ruth Social hoor. Or did he fragment his hard drive cranking out too many midnight memes for “Tic Tac?”
Perhaps he and the Republic might be better served if he were relocated from the Oval Orifice to some other federal assisted-living facility, perhaps the one in Kansas. Or better yet, that really exclusive one outside Penrose, Colo.
What the hell? Name the joint after him. Rattle-can the walls of his cell with some gold Krylon and pipe in the Village People’s greatest hits 24/7. Let him get his jailhouse rocks off until he shuffles off. Some might prefer that he do his farewell dance at the end of a rope, but over the past 10 years I think we’ve all learned to live with disappointment.
If he spends the rest of his days in confinement, alongside his fluffers, family, and friends — the last is a very short list, only one rollaway needed, and someone will have to dig up Roy Cohn to put in it — well, I can live with that.
As long as he’s under round-the clock video surveillance available to any citizen with an Internet connection so he doesn’t get Epsteined when all the guards suddenly decide to piss off for a smoke break as Stephen Miller slips into his cell with a presidential pardon in one hand and a shiv made from a black Sharpie in the other.
• • •
Someone who should most definitely remain at large and holding forth is my man Mike Ferrentino, who has given us another peek at his inner workings over at NSMB.com.
Mike finds balance on an existential three-legged stool — writing, wrenching, and riding. Take one of these things away and shit gets wobbly.
In the mid-90s I hit a sweet spot for a few years. Throwing wrenches for paychecks balanced the head-fuzz of writing for paychecks, while riding and racing provided this lung and muscle stabilizer, a physical set of checks and balances for all the strobing head noise and fingernail grease. The three-legged stool was pretty damn bomber there for a while. With occasional forays out of the shop into spinning wrenches at events, or cosplaying as a World Cup mechanic, I was staying sharp on the tools, could still stomp the pedals like I meant it, and it felt as if words were just pouring out of my skull.
Everything seems a little slower now.
Total immersion. Absorb the ambience, excrete the wisdom, rinse and repeat. I can dig it.
One of the reasons Herself and I left CrustyTucky for Bibleburg in 2002 was that as a velo-scribbler I needed an actual cycling community for perspiration and inspiration.
I had that, in our first stint in B-burg, from 1991 to 1995. But up in the Wet Mountain boondocks there was only Your Humble Narrator and the Deadline.
Now and then I miss that relentless, unforgiving sonofabitch. When money talks, what makes bullshit walk is the Deadline.
You can’t bullshit the Deadline. It is not an essay question, or even multiple choice. You either make it or you don’t; true or false, right or wrong. And a freelancer only gets so many wrongs before an editor figures you are all the way wrong and stops giving you assignments and/or taking your calls.
More than once I found myself forced to cook up a last-minute Column About Nothing, a dish that satisfies neither chef nor customer, on a par with empty-cupboard feeds like pasta with butter, salt, and pepper, or catsup soup with saltines. Better to move back to a place that has groceries, restaurants, takeout. Also, cyclists, group rides, bike shops.
It worked, too, for a while. We did a dozen years that second round in the B-burg, and now we’ve done a dozen here in The Duck! City, the last four and a half of which I have whiled away as a Gentleman of Leisure.
The Deadline no longer torments me. “Everything seems a little slower now,” as Señor Ferrentino observes.
• • •
That includes me. I quit racing, as both a participant and a spectator. I burn a damn sight less daylight on group rides and lurking around bike shops. Plus I no longer write, draw or edit for money. Which is probably a good thing, if Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic is correct and we are well into becoming a postliterate society.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.
My crowd was tough enough Back in the Day®. The postliterati would have no patience for me and my periodic digressions into politics, which like banned substances I injected into cartoons and columns to make them hop like pot-belged bunnies. Some of those screeds were long! 750 words! Who has the time?
Truth be told, all these years later, I feel some belated sympathy for the readers who bellowed, “Keep politics out of cycling!” They were ignorant, of course, and wrong — politics has its greedy, grasping little fingers in everything, including cycling — and stupidity should be painful. Like writing, and reading, especially if you’re reading whatever I’m writing. I mean, 750 words! The fuck? Etc.
It’s looking like a whole new ballgame now, hey? But in a way, it’s the same old ballgame. We began as monkeys screeching at each other in person, then became monkeys who scrawled rude and often indecipherable notes to each other through intermediaries, and now we’re going to be monkeys screeching at each other on our phones, with an assist from artificial intelligence.
But who knows how long A.I. will find that sort of thing amusing? Talk about your short attention spans — brain the size of the Death Star and what’s it doing? Using 0.000000001 percent of capacity to help the filthy meat-things make TikToks of themselves as gods or Marvel superheroes, which are often the same thing; to a certain crowd, anyway.
One wonders what the rest of A.I. is up to.
“See, dummies, he’s not a senile old fool, he’s Captain America! No, he’s Jesus! Oh, look, now he’s Jesus America!”
Hey, it’s all entertainment. Just ask your phone. No fake news in there. Pay no attention to the man — or whatever it is — behind the display.
You could see it all coming way back in 1968, when Richard Nixon popped up in a cameo on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” saying, “Sock it to me?”
To drain the swamp, one must become the swamp. Or something like that.
Swamp Thing doesn’t want anyone (other than himself) peeing in “his” pool.
It wasn’t enough to flush $16 mil’ or so through the Lincoln Memorial Septic Tank and into some cronies’ wallets, only to see it mutate into a bubbling cauldron of goo that could dissolve Aquaman into a scattering of bleached bones.
Now he’s installed National Guardpersons, U.S. Marshals, and a couple of A.I. FinkBot 9000s™ to catch any passing “terrorists,” “antifa,” or “citizens” who happen to pause while passing the National Terlet to remark: “What is that hideous stench? Is there a dead raccoon on the premises or is Hair Füror dropping a deuce in his drawers behind one of those trees over there?”
Nope. Swamp Thing he does his doody in plain sight — it’s how he marks territory since he can’t win a war, not even the ones he starts — and then makes his knaves, varlets, henchmen, fluffers and fixers compose spontaneous poetry like “How shall we compare thy loaf-pinching to a spritz of Chanel No. 5 at Neiman Marcus?”
Reflect on that, if you feel so inclined. Me? I need some air.
“Some poor unsuspecting person is going to trip and fall into that stuff and become a @Marvel supervillain.” — a commenter unearthed by Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place.
Actually, it’s too late for that: Marvel Comics already has the Green Goblin, one of Spider-Man’s earliest adversaries. Dude experimented on himself with an unstable chemical and developed an alternate, evil personality that became the president of the United States — twice.
OK, so I made that last part up. But it would explain a lot.
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.
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?
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