Well, the bad news is that the DOGEbags are on the verge of learning — well, basically, everything about U.S. individuals and corporations — with the goal of making Elon Musk and his billionaire buccaneers even richer than they already are.
The good news is that asteroid 2024 YR4 may blow us all to smithereens, rich and poor alike, when it arrives around Christmas 2032.
Might I suggest that Skippy the Dipshit pull his snout out of our butts for a moment to commandeer Thor’s hammer from Marvel Studios, zip up to 2024 YR4 in an armored Cybertruck Starship, and swat the pesky rock into the heart of the Klingon Empire?
Of course, Cap’n Skippy might not pack quite a wallop once he’s off-planet, where money is just so many pictures of dead presidents, most of whom were not drooling, raving embarrassments. But at least it would keep his sticky little fingers out of our pockets for a while.
Wonder Wart-Hog, president of the United States? Hey, we’ve had worse.
Gilbert Shelton saw this coming.
You may remember him as the creator of “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,” if you ever knew his work at all (he wasn’t in the Sunday funnies section of the Muthalode Morning Mishap when you were a sprout).
I first saw Shelton’s stuff in Texas, back in the Sixties, when as an aspiring young motorhead I stumbled across his “Wonder Wart-Hog” strip in Pete Millar’s Drag Cartoons.
Even then I was a comics/superhero fiend, and dug satires of the genre, like “Captain Klutz,” which Don Martin created for Mad magazine. So naturally I loved the Hog of Steel and his alter ego, deuce reporter Philbert Desanex (a “deuce reporter” sitting at the opposite end of the pay scale from an “ace”).
Shelton wasn’t just another funny fella. He was also a student of American history and politics, and often aimed his pen at same in his work (see “Give Me Liberty: A Revised History of the American Revolution,” from 1976).
But man, he really hit his stride with “Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November.” A cartoon collection bearing that title was published in 1980, and the titular strip included the following:
A stony-broke, hungry, unemployed journalist (Desanex).
A Supreme Court that ruled the First Amendment was “a typographical error.”
Assassinations and a discussion of the presidential line of succession (through the secretary of the Treasury, anyway).
The country, having run through 13 presidents on one day, being managed as a trust by the board of directors of Gloptron, Inc., “an immense multinational cartel.”
A presidential primary contest, in which Desanex secures the nominations of both the Democratic and Republican parties (OK, so that may seem a little far-fetched).
Gloptron’s attempt to assassinate Desanex (foiled by the Hog of Steel).
Gloptron’s queering of the weather on Election Day, hoping to keep all the voters home. It didn’t work: Desanex wins the popular vote.
Gloptron’s zombies overturn the popular vote via the Electoral College and the coup is buried on page 67 of the next day’s newspaper (“Well, after all, it is Gloptron’s newspaper, Mr. Desanex,” explains an aide.
Desanex takes his case back to the people, calling for a constitutional convention on New Year’s Eve to rewrite that hallowed document and dispose of the Electoral College.
With predictable results, it being New Year’s Eve:
By the way, the splash panel is a fakeout. In the cartoon, the pig doesn’t win the presidency. Adolf Hitler does — seems he didn’t die in that bunker after all, having taken it on the lam after first getting his skull and teeth surgically removed to mislead his enemies.
And, after an extended rant against — well, pretty much everything and everyone, promising the convention “a strong, decisive leader who can bring back law and order and restore the nation’s dignity in the eyes of the world … purge the population of misfits, get our armed forces into shape and declare war on everybody who won’t toe the line!” — the new dictator of the USA orders an invasion of Mexico “on the pretext that the Mexicans had been secretly invading the United States for years.”
Any of this sounding familiar to you?
• Editor’s note: The headline comes from (of course) Hunter S. Thompson, who in “The Great Shark Hunt” rewrote that old saw, “You can’t wallow with the pigs at night and then soar with the eagles in the morning,” which came up in a half-remembered conversation at a Colorado bar in which a construction worker told a bartender why he shouldn’t have another drink.
Wrote HST:
No, I thought, that geek in Colorado had it all wrong. The real problem is how to wallow with the eagles at night and then soar with the pigs in the morning.
Irish Space Travellers docking at The Duck! City Vortex? Nah, just our weather station.
Some vortexes suck more than others, I guess.
The Guardian has picked up on a story I saw earlier in The Washington Post, basically the same ol’, same ol’, about how some of The Beautiful People in Sedona would rather that the Help did not share their ZIP code.
It seems Sedona, like Santa Fe, Taos, Aspen, et al., is a few rooftops short of affordable housing for the worker bees who keep their fauxdobe hives filled with organic, free-range, GMO-free honey. Thus, some of the folks who fluff Swiss chard at Whole Foods or pillows at resorts keep getting rousted from local parking lots, state parks, or the national forest, where they live in their cars between shifts in the barrel(s).
One short-term solution being considered is a “safe place to park” program that would accommodate 40 vehicles (belonging to Sedona’s unhoused workforce, not itinerant bands of Travellers, meth cooks, and hookers). The idea is to provide bathrooms, showers, and a fixed location for workers who are already living in their autos wherever they can find a place to park them. A social-services organization would vet the “tenants” to make sure no Irish were sneaking in.
Jodi Jackson, who lives in an RV and works at a local coin laundry, told The Guardian: “We may not be housed and living in town, but we’re the ones who are doing your laundry, working at your gas stations, working at your restaurants — all of the lower-wage jobs – delivering your pizza, for God’s sake. We’re not bad people. We just need a little bit of help.”
Don’t we all, at some time or another? When I was a pup I occasionally brushed up against the rough edges of capitalism, newspaper style. It’s why I declined an offer of “casual labor” on the copy desk of the San Jose Mercury News — “casual labor” meaning “We don’t know exactly when we’ll need you, but it won’t be 40 hours a week with the usual bennies.” It’s why I decided to settle in Española instead of Santa Fe when I got the gig at The New Mexican.
They want to work, all right; they just want homes to go to when the shift’s over, like everyone else.
• Editor’s note:The headline is lifted from “Blue Highways” by William Least Heat-Moon, who during a stretch of personal and professional difficulty kipped in a 1975 Ford Econoline while motoring around the country to see how other people were getting along.
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