Here’s a tasty bit of watermelon for all the veterans in the audience — sunrise over the Sandias — from your friendly neighborhood pinko.
Let’s also give a thought to all those who aren’t around to see it on Veterans Day 2024. Some of them might be a little upset with us for surrendering to the fascists they fought.
Once again I was awake too early.
We’d bailed on election-night coverage as it slouched inexorably toward its denouement because someone around here has to get up at stupid-thirty to make us some money. Not me.
If I had dreams, I don’t remember them. But I do remember something Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post said during the PBS coverage last night.
It was a particularly fatheaded pronouncement, even for an associate editor of The Washington Post. And I didn’t make a note of it because I’d said something similar the first time TFG flipped his wig into the ring. That the 2016 election would show us who we were as a country.
Plenty of us already knew what we were then. Not enough, though. But surely anyone who has been paying attention since has caught up. Right?
Well, there’s the phone, on the nightstand. It’s not my practice to take the pulse of the planet before coffee, but I could hear Herself prepping in the bathroom and thought that if I got cracking I could make her a bite of breakfast before she left. If she had any appetite.
And so I picked up the phone.
Well, the rest you know. Another massive breakdown of politics, press, and populace. We’re just waiting on the details, is all.
Hunter S. Thompson has already filed his report, of course. He had the scoop after my first election, in 1972, when he wrote:
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.
[George] McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?
We still don’t know the answer to that one, Hunter old sot. The barrel appears to have no bottom.
Almost all economists agree that taxes on imports are, in fact, passed on to consumers. Why? Because that’s what the evidence says, and it’s very hard to come up with an alternative story.
On the other hand, Trump loyalists — which these days means almost the entire Republican Party — insist as a group that foreigners, not American consumers, pay taxes on imports. Why? Because Donald Trump says so. — Paul Krugman, “Trumpism, Stalinism and the Tariff Debate.”
“Stick to cycling!” the critics would howl whenever one of my columns or cartoons drifted off the back of racing or retailing and into the gutter of politics.
But cycling and politics are inextricably linked. With the right people at the helm, if you’re lucky, maybe you get peace and prosperity plus bike paths, open space and crosswalk push-buttons that you can reach from the saddle (and that actually work).
Ever negotiated with The Authorities while promoting a bike race? That’s politics. Sought cyclist-friendly safety improvements at a dangerous intersection? That’s politics too. Ditto dealing over e-bike access to — and speed limits on — bike paths, where most of the motors run on carbohydrates and water.
Thus my retort was inevitably something like: “You don’t like my work? Don’t watch. Plenty of other stuff to read around here. Now stand back and let The Big Dog bark.”
Well. That was then, and this is now.
I still feel as though I should be writing more about politics. But damme if it isn’t a long pull into a stiff wind.
No matter what else is on my mind, it’s always there in the background, ticking away. Could be an old analog clock; could be a time bomb. Only way to find out is to have a little look-see.
Last night it was a three-hour (!) YouTube stream of a school-board policy-committee meeting. Tonight it’s the steel-cage death match between Komrade Kamala and Felonious Punk.
As debates go tonight’s action seems likely to be less lofty than in the word’s modern definition (a regulated discussion of a proposition) and more like its two-fisted past (the Anglo-French debatre, from de- + batre, to beat, from the Latin battuere).
Jaysis wept, etc. Who wouldn’t rather write about cycling, given the choice? In another corner of this little shop of horrors I’m 300 words and counting into a post about Herself’s 2006 Soma Double Cross.
But Charlie Pierce had to go and pull my chain. Actually, he was pulling A.O. Furburger’s chain for not letting The New York Times call a fascist a fascist.
Wrote Chazbo:
He is a mentally unraveling out-and-out fascist and he is within a whisker of the White House again. He is a mortal threat to everything that is vital to the survival of this republic as we know it. To write about him as such, and to write about him as such every damn day from now until the first Tuesday of November is the proper, truthful, and, yes, the objective thing to do.
Talk about a long pull into a stiff wind. ’Tis a flick of the elbow Charlie is giving us so. I don’t propose to make every post about politics, but I feel as though it’s only proper to lay off the wheelsucking and stick my snout in the breeze now and then.
Call me cynical (“You’re cynical!”), but I don’t think that other cat, the bedraggled, raggedy-ass orange tom that keeps slinking around the joint, yowling, spraying on the national furniture, and clawing the Stars & Stripes curtains into ribbons, is in danger of being put to sleep anytime soon.
Nossiree, he’s got himself a solid majority of black-robed laps in which to curl up while he awaits delivery of The Big Fish, the one that got away on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fuck me running.
Meanwhile, the playacting continues. Government shutdown: Will they or won’t they? Dueling VIP visits to The Border, that deadly, open-air, razor-wired waiting room where all the brown foreigners go to apply for the jobs nobody else wants. The Senate leadership following the House down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Gaza. Ukraine. “Dynamic pricing” at Wendy’s.
And now, this: Is a president a king?
I thought we settled that question back in 1776. But as I recall, that king required a few years of rather aggressive convincing before he conceded the point.
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