From the Feb. 2 edition of “Today in History,” by The Associated Press: “In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, officially ending the Mexican-American War.”
I guess nobody told the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus. Los siento mucho. Incoming!
Whew. Looks like I picked a good week to go on a news fast. These pendejos are pitching fastballs. At this pace there won’t be a wall without shit running down it before Valentine’s Day. A lot of it won’t stick, but it’s gonna pile up. The forecast calls for deep doo.
My news fast coincided with a cold snap that kept me off the bike. I don’t object to cycling in the 30s if the sun’s out, but when Tōnatiuh abdicates in favor of Ehecatl, it’s time to go for a run.
Thing is, I’m not a runner. Not really. A runner certainly wouldn’t call me one. Especially if s/he’d caught me at it.
I can pretend for 45 minutes but that’s about it. And that doesn’t burn a lot of daylight for a fella trying to avoid the doomscrolling.
Still, I managed. For about four days. Who can avert his or her eyes while passing a domestic disturbance in daylight or an unshaded window at night? This is like driving past a five-car crash without checking the gutters for rolling heads.
So I eased back in, slowly. A little Kevin Drum. Then a bit of Charlie Pierce. This is akin to reading the police report, if Joseph Wambaugh wrote it. The Atlantic, for a soupçon of button-down viewing with alarm.
Finally, I hit the hard stuff. The New York Times. Holy shit, etc.
I hope the rubes who elected this bozo are enjoying the shitshow. Looks like it’ll be a good long while before he gets those egg prices down.
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:
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.
Blame the Wolf Moon. A vacationing wife. An acid flashback. Whatever.
But when I blinked myself awake in the dark on Tuesday morning I had no idea where I was.
If dementia runs in your family, as it does in mine, this can freak you right the hell out. But I found it oddly exhilarating.
“Where am I? Who knows? Who cares? This is great!”
And then I remembered.
“Aw, shit. Trumpsylvania.”
We’re just a few all-too-short days away from the sequel to a movie I never wanted to see in the first place. “Mr. Hyde Goes to Washington” should’ve been a one-off. But nooooooo. Everything has to be a franchise now. When the Joker started getting top billing we should’ve known what was coming. It’s just one evil clown after another.
But hey: It’s an excuse for another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, in which I make it all about me. I tell ya, it’s evil clowns all the way down.
• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The wolf howls from Freesound, as do the sad trombones and the vinyl scratching. “Morning Mood” is from “Peer Gynt” by Edvard Grieg. Arthur, King of the Britons, and an anarcho-syndicalist peasant come from “Monty Python and The Holy Grail.” You’ll catch a snippet of the “Grapes of Wrath” theme in there (almost went with “Death Valley Days.”). The ass-kissing is by Your Humble Narrator. The sound effect, not the actual, y’know, like, obesiance. And the classic “There Stands the Glass” is courtesy of Ted Hawkins via YouTube. As usual, all the other raving can be pinned on the landlord of this dump.
The New York Times spent most of yesterday pitching live episodes of “Let’s Make a Deal” from the nation’s capital. And today they’re telling me that nobody could give a shit; they’d all rather be watching “The Golden Bachelor.”
Well. Sounds like poor editorial judgment to me. Should’ve led with another Taylor Swift story.
Whoops, there she is.
Well, I gave a shit — no, not about “The Golden Bachelor” or Taylor Swift, who gets more eyeballs than a TikTok video of kitties in a titty bar — but rather the brinksmanship peacockery so deplorably on display in DeeCee.
It’s a weakness. But I could afford to indulge it.
Dinner was leftovers from Friday night — Melissa Clark’s paprika chicken with taters and turnips — so cooking was a rerun, or, more precisely, a reheat, at 350° for 20 minutes.
This left me at liberty to observe, and screech, and curse, and place bets with myself about what would finally emerge from all the shit-talking, gesticulating, and shoving that usually precedes a whole bunch of nothing happening on the middle-school playground of your choice.
This is pointless idiocy, of course. Right up there with cashing out the 401(k) and putting it all into bitcoin and NFTs; playing poker with a man named “Doc;” or gambling in any of the various casinos masquerading as “sports” in this world.
By closing time, the can had gotten kicked another 45 days down the road and I had lost every bet.
Still, could be worse.
Ukraine must be wondering how they wound up out on the sidewalk with an IOU in one pocket of the fatigues puddled around their ankles. And the woodlice gnawing on Charlie McCarthy’s balsa-sack apparently found out this wasn’t an all-you-can-eat deal.
This morning I decided this class in Political Science Fiction 101 reminded me of a scene from “Cannery Row,” in which John Steinbeck describes the upshot of an uprising by “a group of high-minded ladies” in Monterey demanding the closure of “dens of vice” like Dora Flood’s Bear Flag Restaurant, which was not a sandwich shop but rather a “sporting house.”
Writes Steinbeck:
This happened about once a year in the dead period between the Fourth of July and the County Fair. Dora usually closed the Bear Flag for a week when it happened. It wasn’t so bad. Everyone got a vacation and little repairs to the plumbing and the walls could be made. But this year the ladies went on a real crusade. They wanted somebody’s scalp. It had been a dull summer and they were restless. It got so bad that they had to be told who actually owned the property where vice was practiced, what the rents were and what little hardships might be the result of their closing. That was how close they were to being a serious menace.
You think maybe the high-minded ladies in DeeCee got told who really owns this whore-House? And if so, did they get the message? Who knows? Not me, cousin. But we have 45 days to find out.
Anyway, once the cartoon was over we got straight to the featured attraction, which included the aforementioned leftovers; rewatching “Reservation Dogs,” which concluded its three-season run this past Wednesday; and debating whether we should take down our hummingbird feeders, which hadn’t been getting many (if any) customers the past few days.
I argued for staying open, and boom! Just like that a hummer appeared at one of the backyard feeders, which are visible from the living-room couch. Maybe he was an elder who didn’t care to make the trek to Mexico this fall. Maybe she likes the new landscaping. Maybe they like “Reservation Dogs.” Pronouns are a bitch.
Anyway, we reloaded those two feeders and called it a night. This morning, The Last Hummingbird Standing brought a cousin over for breakfast. It wasn’t Matt Gaetz. I’ll call that a win.
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