Category: Deep political thought

‘Bigger even than I had feared’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Flush twice, it’s a long way to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

The headline is taken from the 1978 Thomas McGuane novel “Panama.”

Chet Pomeroy, a performer on the skids whose act has included, among lesser spectacles, crawling out of the ass of a frozen elephant in his underwear to fight a duel with a baseball batting-practice machine, is stalking his ex-girlfriend Catherine Clay through the aisles of a Key West grocery.

She clocks him, he asks to use the bathroom, and … well, just read the book. It’s a lot more entertaining and informative, and at its most outrageous less grotesque, than last night’s “debate.”

Not even McGuane the essayist could’ve covered that raree-show, assuming he could resurrect his long-dead alter ego of Captain Berserko. Hunter S. Thompson might have managed, even participated, but sadly he is no longer with us.

It may have been the single worst thing I have ever invited into my home, and that is a fierce competition indeed. Miss Mia Sopaipilla blew a hairball. I dreamed of Nazis. Herself told me first thing this morning that CNN’s Dana Bash had called it “a shitshow,” which I thought generous and profoundly understated.

Still, I’m glad to see the mainstream media has finally copped on, albeit a trifle late. McGuane had it figured out back in 1971, when Bash was born, seven years before he would publish “Panama.”

Queried about his politics by comrade Jim Harrison, as part of a faux interview for the literary magazine Sumac, McGuane replied thusly:

“I suppose I am a bit left of Left. America has become a dildo that has turned berserkly on its owner.”

Old Yellers

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Double your pleasure. Or not.

Nobody would call me an undecided voter.

I decided long before Election Day 2016 that I would vote for a thrift-store toaster, a rabid bat, or the empty chair Clint Eastwood was yelling at if any of these items were running against Adolf Twitler. And that remains the case today.

Yet I feel oddly compelled to watch tonight’s “debate,” the way Arthur Denton craved the tender mercies of Orin Scrivello, DDS, in “Little Shop of Horrors.”

I don’t know why. If I were smart, I could always just toddle down to the golf course, catch a couple geezers arguing about which one of them is best equipped to drive the cart into the water hazard. Watch fat Corgis bark at each other on YouTube. Bang my forehead on the keyboard for a while, then check the mirror to see how many new words I’ve invented.

Hyyb! Yuij! Ddfcv!

Alas, as you know, I will never be smart. And after tonight, I am liable to feel even dumberer than usual.

Some like it hot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Lessee, there’s freedom of the press, freedom of speech,
and freedom to run like hell from the cops with their heat ray. Got it.

H.G. Wells got it wrong. Mars isn’t the problem.

Before the feds drove protesters from Lafayette Square in June, according to an Army National Guard major who was there, the Defense Department’s top military police officer in the Washington region emailed officers in the D.C. National Guard to ask whether the unit had “a microwave-like weapon called the Active Denial System, which was designed by the military to make people feel like their skin is burning when in range of its invisible rays.”

According to The Washington Post:

The technology, also called a “heat ray,” was developed to disperse large crowds in the early 2000s but was shelved amid concerns about its effectiveness, safety and the ethics of using it on human beings.

Pentagon officials were reluctant to use the device in Iraq. In late 2018, The New York Times reported, the Trump administration had weighed using the device on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border — an idea shot down by Kirstjen Nielsen, then the Homeland Security secretary, citing humanitarian concerns.

But in the email, on which DeMarco was copied, the lead military police officer in the National Capital Region wrote the ADS device “can provide our troops a capacity they currently do not have, the ability to reach out and engage potential adversaries at distances well beyond small arms range, and in a safe, effective, and nonlethal manner.”

Federal police ultimately were unable to obtain a heat ray device — or an LRAD — during the early days of protests in D.C., according to the Defense Department official.

“During the early days,” hey? Don’t forget to wear your Alcoa cammies when you’re out smashing the state, boys and girls. And spray yourself with a little olive oil, maybe stuff a few onions, taters, and carrots into your undies. The “Martians” are going to need a lunch break at some point.