Category: Deep political thought

Chicken Kyiv

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
A Red Dawn behind the Tree of Liberty?
Nah. Just sunrise behind a cottonwood.

Early on, as a retired pinko turned journo, I was something of an amateur Kremlinologist. Read a lot of George Kennan and Adam Ulam; subscribed to Foreign Policy magazine. Never did get what you might call a handle on the folks who caused me to spend a portion of my childhood crouched under various schoolroom desks.

The Soviet leadership invariably seemed avaricious, belligerent, paranoid, and treacherous (do unto others before they do unto you). Their people, meanwhile, seemed to possess a limitless capacity for suffering.

It’s more or less a straight line from Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country” of 1925, which made Moscow the Vatican City of Communism, a palace of never-ending intrigues, to Khrushchev’s “We will bury you!” of 1956.

But the ol’ shoe-banger couldn’t even bury Stalinism.

Khrushchev — who made his Red bones early on as a Stalinist henchman and later as the Soviet Union’s top man in (wait for it) Ukraine — eventually came to realize that if the Marxist-Leninist family were to prosper, Mother Russia would have to acknowledge a few red-headed stepchildren.

But once he started talking about International Communism being a sort of stern Baskin-Robbins with a flavor for everyone, that was his ass. Uncle Joe cast a real long shadow.

Khrushchev’s successors, among them Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, tried to rattle-can a new coat of paint on the old red Zil, kept it chugging along for a while. But it finally wound up in the ditch, and gangs of roving oligarchs stripped it for parts.

Now we’ve got this former KGB spook behind the wheel. Clearly a man with a fondness for the classics, Putin wants to put the band back together. Those Ukraine girls must really knock him out.

Gimme shelter.

Not exactly a mission from God. More like a mission from Stalin.

Jesus H. Christ. Can’t somebody get a permanent hammer-and-sickle-lock on this guy? I’m getting too old to keep crawling under my desk. And anyway, the cat beat me to it.

Joe-wee

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
I wonder what we could get for this pee tape?

OK, so we chain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to the bottom of an empty Olympic-size pool. We charge average Americans $5 a go to pee in the pool, and sell the “streaming” rights to the highest bidder.

All proceeds go toward eliminating the debt and deficit, minus a small cash prize to whoever finally puts the two of them under water.

There will be some who say this won’t eliminate the debt or the deficit, or even shove Sleepy Joe’s Incredible Shrinking Build Back Better bill through the legislative sausage grinder. And they’re absolutely right.

But let’s do it anyway.

There’s cold in them thar hills

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Thor is taking a few tentative swings with Mjölnir this morning.

The arm and knee warmers have begun tagging along on my morning rides.

I don’t always wear ’em, but it’s nice to know I have ’em. Just in case.

If I were riding today I’d pack a rain jacket, because the NWS boyos are calling for thunderbummers. And snow? Really? In the higher elevations, to be sure, but still, damn. You’d think it was almost October or sumpin’.

Speaking of a chill in high places, I see the usual rampant dipshittery has hit a frosty new low in DeeCee. Fuck me running, but it has become wearisome to watch our national “leadership” rolling around in that big ol’ barrel of titties and telling the rest of us to go suck on our thumbs.

Can we get a conservatorship established to oversee this mess? Maybe Britney Spears could recommend someone. Then again, maybe not.

Personally, I’d like to see more than a few of these Gilded Age fuck-bubbles loaded aboard the next Jeff Bozos dick-missile to the stars, with nothing to eat but each other, but only if we’re talking a one-way ticket.

I suppose we’d wind up replacing them with more of the same. But maybe the new crowd might think about dinner and a movie, and maybe kissing us, before sticking it in.

Something might be gaining on you

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
It’s been a long, long road.

While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and the dying. — Erich Maria Remarque, “All Quiet on the Western Front”

I didn’t have much to say on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and a decade further on down the road I feel even less inclined to hold forth on the topic. A bunch of people got dead, maimed, or insane; another bunch got rich, famous, and powerful; and the rest of us went shopping.

Did we learn anything from the attacks and what Charlie Pierce calls “our blind, feral response?” Doubtful. We check the rear view every 10 years or so, but that’s just reflexive, like glancing at a TV as you pass.

Anything good on? Nahhhhhhh. Same ol’, same ol’. Hey, who wants to go to the mall?

A workin’ man can’t get nowhere today

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Luck of the draw.

Happy Labor Day, comrades.

I’m barely a worker these days; my paying chores have dwindled to one “Shop Talk” cartoon per month for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.

Of course, now that BRAIN is a part of the Greater Outside Globe-Spanning Vertically Integrated Paywalled Conglomerate, I find myself negotiating a contract to keep my faded Levi’s up and buckled while I continue to do what I’ve been doing for nigh on to 30 years. So it goes.

Thus, in solidarity with all y’all still on The Man’s clock, here a few random tales culled from our workaday world:

• Hotel workers serve as an unsung pit crew for the firefighters battling the Caldor blaze.

• Job openings outnumber the unemployed. But a gulf between the jobs available and what workers want has led to a “Great Reassessment.”

• Speaking of assessments, are the bots trying to upend the MeatWorld JobMart or are we just stumbling around in the dark as per usual? Kevin Drum has some brief thoughts on the topic.

• Is the boss watching, even when you’re working from home? Maybe. Say hello to “tattleware.”

• Can a workin’ man get somewhere today? He surely couldn’t back in 1978, according to Merle Haggard.