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.
Wonder Wart-Hog, president of the United States? Hey, we’ve had worse.
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:
A stony-broke, hungry, unemployed journalist (Desanex).
A Supreme Court that ruled the First Amendment was “a typographical error.”
Assassinations and a discussion of the presidential line of succession (through the secretary of the Treasury, anyway).
The country, having run through 13 presidents on one day, being managed as a trust by the board of directors of Gloptron, Inc., “an immense multinational cartel.”
A presidential primary contest, in which Desanex secures the nominations of both the Democratic and Republican parties (OK, so that may seem a little far-fetched).
Gloptron’s attempt to assassinate Desanex (foiled by the Hog of Steel).
Gloptron’s queering of the weather on Election Day, hoping to keep all the voters home. It didn’t work: Desanex wins the popular vote.
Gloptron’s zombies overturn the popular vote via the Electoral College and the coup is buried on page 67 of the next day’s newspaper (“Well, after all, it is Gloptron’s newspaper, Mr. Desanex,” explains an aide.
Desanex takes his case back to the people, calling for a constitutional convention on New Year’s Eve to rewrite that hallowed document and dispose of the Electoral College.
With predictable results, it being New Year’s Eve:
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.
I don’t know about you folks, but every time a judge wanted to sentence me for something, I had to, like, be in court, an’ shit.
Tell me again about the whole “rule of law” thing. And then show me the tab for treating Nazi Jesus like he was some senile old fool who just “forgot” that he tried to walk out of the store with the whole country in his pocket.
Fuck me. Arlo Guthrie got tossed in the clink and fined $50 for illegally dumping garbage in Stockbridge, Mass. Nazi Jesus took a dump on the entire United States of America and he’ll be cheating on the front nine before noon Florida time.
And come Jan. 20, he’ll take his act on the road, to the White House.
Just another day at Alice’s Restaurant for this guy. He can get anything he wants. Excepting Alice.
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.
Having taken note of of the pummeling endured by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for showing all the backbone of two clawless fiddler crabs when it came time to take a stand in the 2024 pestilential erection, Mother Times struggles up out of her rocker on the Saturday before Election Day, squeaks out a fart, and plops back down.
“That’ll show ’em,” she mutters before falling back into a fitful snooze.
