“Welcome to the hotel, California. … hey, wait, he’s got a gun!”
I was visiting The Associated Press website, checking out the security-cam video of our latest alleged would-be pestilential assassin dashing through the Washington Hilton towards the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Wank-Fest & Spooge-a-Thon, when the video snippet served me up an ad:
“Breeze through tax season … with Acrobat AI Assistant.”
Well. Fuck me running. Ain’t that just the way it is? Some things will never change.
Dude was definitely breezing through, with what was reported to be quite the toolkit — “The suspect was carrying knives, a shotgun and a handgun, officials said,” according to The New York Times — and quien sabe? Maybe tax season was on his mind. He may have simply wanted to consult with The Pestilence and his lesser maladies about how best to dodge his fair share of the ever-heavier burden the dozy orange sonofabitch is imposing upon us day in and day out.
In any event, as this flag-pinned plague shambles ever on and on, lying through its false teeth like any other dementia victim denying at the top of what remains of his lungs that he has yet again shit the bed, I am less and less inclined to take at face value anything I read with the qualifier “officials said” attached. I have stayed in many a Hilton over the years, occasionally with a loaded firearm, and more than once I have been sorely tempted to haul it out, if only to focus someone’s attention.
“When I booked this overpriced shithole I said I wanted a room as far away from the elevator and the ice machine as was humanly possible. Also, was the previous occupant grooming a chimpanzee in the shower? I’ve seen barber shops with less hair on the floor. And what’s with the goddamn Keurig instead of a proper coffeemaker? If you force me into going to a Starbucks at stupid-thirty for my morning fix, I swear to Dog. …”
Etc.
In any event, I awakened this morning — not in a Hilton, praise Dog — possessed of the certainty that this is not the last time we will read the words “shots fired” in connection with His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered. “Every nation has the government it deserves,” as the political philosopher Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811.
A decade later, he wrote, “The sword of justice has no scabbard.”
I have some thoughts about a long-overdue firing. The underperforming employee is pictured above. Let’s fire him — to the moon. Tell him it’s made of Mickey D’s cheeseburgers and he can be king of the place until the oxygen and/or ketchup runs out.
I call this “Shitty iPhone 13 Mini Snapshot of the Moon Taken on Zoom While Setting Out the Trash and Recycling.”
What a great week to be offworld, hey?
I mean, sure, the Artemis II’s toilet keeps crapping out (har de har har). And then there’s that whole “hitching a ride home on the moon’s gravity” thing, which sounds kinda crucial, because nobody wants to ask the Vogons for a lift, what with the bad poetry and all.
But at least the astronauts don’t have to have one of those tiresome “the president would like a word” wankfests with War Piggy, a.k.a. Addled Shitler, because he’s too busy trying to see to it that they don’t have a world to return to.
Sigh. Have you noticed how we keep launching all the wrong people into space? I can think of one eejit — plus another 18 in the presidential line of succession — who would make an excellent audience for a Vogon poetry reading somewhere on the other side of the galaxy.
Last June, more than five million people took to the streets across more than 2,100 events during the coalition’s first day of action. Then, more than seven million people protested across more than 2,700 events last October. The March 28 mobilization is the next step in this growing movement, with organizers anticipating it will be one of the largest single-day nonviolent nationwide protests in U.S. history.
It’s not a riot going on, or at least it shouldn’t be. And with any luck at all we won’t all wind up on Cellblock No. 9, wearing bruises and zip-ties. Here in The Duck! City we’re gonna be in a park, with shade trees and music, even a march! (Cue the revolution scene from “Reds,” but without all that winter garb.)
Rallies and marches can feel a tad performative, mostly because they are. But they help you remember that you’re not alone, it’s not just you or the Voices in your head, there really is something of a problem here, and if we’re lucky, and there are enough of us intent on doing something about it, we can use ballots instead of bullets because the last game in town that needs a shot in the arm these days is the funeral racket.
A mass thumbing of the national noses may also give an atomic wedgie to a certain diapered dictator at some point during his 24 hours per diem of TV-watching, assuming the legacy media actually turns on and tunes in.
Which is always something of an assumption. So, before you head out the door to your local No Kings gathering, call a couple TV stations and invite them to join the party.
No, not that party. Whaddaya think this is, a Warren Beatty movie?
Still, this year’s “spring forward” meant we spent one less hour today stacking sandbags against the tide of bullshit flowing downstream from the Orange House.
So, winning? Maybe. We must take these little victories wherever we find them.
This morning I burned a little of my saved daylight by reading an essay in The New York Times, in which the daughter of two former American revolutionaries found the Oscar-nominated “One Battle After Another” to be “nothing more than entertainment” rather than “a battle cry for a generation.”
Huh. Hollywood veterano Paul Thomas Anderson cranks out a rapid-fire rom-com inspired by a rambling mythical history by Thomas Pynchon, and Hope Reeves — who herself is working on a comic memoir of being raised by retired Weatherpersons James H. Reeves and Susan Hagedorn — finds it regrettably unserious.
Well. Shit. Can’t have that. Can we?
Why not?
• • •
I myself have been regrettably unserious since — well, since forever — and, like the thought of suicide, it has gotten me successfully through many a bad night. And a few fairly grim days, too, whether shortened or lengthened by government fiat.
My upbringing was unremarkably middle-class — Catholic Republican father, Presbyterian Democrat mother — and yet somehow I came to cast myself in the role of atheist radical son.
A diet rich in Warner Brothers cartoons, Marx Brothers movies and Mad magazine will give a kid a taste for anarchy. Who do you root for? Not The Man, that’s for sure. It was one battle after another and Elmer Fudd lost every one of them.
So while I would eventually become interested in Weatherman, and personally sample various flavors of Marxism — Socialist Workers Party, October League, Communist Party (M-L) — these last two, like Weatherman, offspring of the Students for a Democratic Society — my first real political infatuation was with the Yippies.
• • •
Elmer wanted to cut off my lovely hair and send me to Vietnam. I wanted to Bugs Bunny his ass. And so did the Yippies, whose regrettably serious alias was the Youth International Party.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were probably the most famous of these Groucho Marxists, whose theater was the street. Levitating the Pentagon. Throwing money at traders at the New York Stock Exchange. Running an actual pig — Pigasus the Immortal — for president.
The Yippies invaded Disneyland, taking over Tom Sawyer’s Island, threw pies, and applied for a permit to blow up the General Motors building. When it was denied, the Yippies shrugged and said it only proved that it was impossible to work within the system to change the system.
Alas, that old system sure proved durable, resisting change from within and without.
Some Yippies became yuppies. Rubin traded his Viet Cong flag shirt for the suit and tie of a businessman. He died in 1994 after being hit by a car while crossing Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment. He was 56, well past the 30th birthday after which nobody was to be trusted.
Hoffman jumped bail after a dope bust and went underground. He eventually resurfaced, did some light time, and returned to activism.
But it was the Eighties — remember those fabulous Eighties, kids? — and the old act didn’t seem to be going over so well with a new audience. Hoffman died, reportedly by his own hand, in 1989. He was 52.
• • •
By then, mockery had already begun infiltrating (or was being co-opted by) The Establishment. “Saturday Night Live,” which debuted in 1975 with guest host George Carlin, somehow remains relevant in an aw-shucks-just-kiddin’ sort of way. David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had their innings, and Jimmy Kimmel is still in there pitching despite some booing from the luxury box at Fudd Stadium.
But there’s something about old-school, street-level mockery that really gets The Man’s dander up. The reigning Man, Elmer Befuddled, who hires out his shotgunning of critters at home and abroad because bone spurs, watches a shit-ton of TV. And if he sees yuuuuge crowds from coast to coast rocking the next No Kings rallies on March 28, giving him the old Warner Bros.’ sendoff — “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”— he might just do a John Belushi, spin right out of his chair, and hit the deck in a slobbering, shitting sayonara.
It comforts me to think back to one of Gilbert Shelton’s “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cartoons, in which political candidate Rodney Richpigge commits suicide by proxy, ordering his chauffeur to drive off a bridge because he thinks people are laughing at him (a half pint of amyl nitrite getting an unexpected wash in Fat Freddy’s jeans was the actual giggle-trigger).
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. No matter what time it is.
Mad Blog Media 