I see The Media have a couple new chew toys this morning — a brain-dead SecDef and a completely dead pope.
That should fill The Void for a nanosecond or two.
Now we await the various conclaves. If we see black smoke from the Pentagon, that means that SecDef Yog-Sothoth has burned his Signal passwords and has gone back to using NextDoor for all secure communications involving war plans, pub crawls, and no-strings hookups.
White smoke means that Baby Daddy Musk has sent him on ahead to set up shop on Mars.
Red smoke from the Office of the Vice President means that Hillbilly Boy has failed to convince his god that he had nothing to do with his pope’s death, even though he was one of the last people to see him alive.
Fwooosh! Straight From servicing Beelzebozo to serving Beelzebub in one seriously hot DeeCee minute. Not exactly upward mobility, is it? Sure as shit ain’t the golden escalator Beelzebozo rode down back in 2015, either. More like that elevator ride that Mickey Rourke took at the end of “Angel Heart.”
And the pope? Well … Dad was a ring-kisser, Mom was a Presbyterian, and I turned out to be neither. So I haven’t paid much attention to Holy Mother Church since 1978, when I was still a newspaperman in Bibleburg and we burned through a couple of popes in a month.
If I recall correctly, which is unlikely considering the circumstances, we had finished newspapering for the evening and had retired to Jinx’s Place for cocktails.
A late arrival burst in, as they will do, and told us the pope had just died.
“Catch up,” we replied. “That was last month.”
“That was the old guy,” our informant revealed. “This was the new guy.”
And soon we had a new new guy, to be dubbed “J2P2,” because back then newspaper people knew how to treat anyone who claimed to speak with God’s voice, whether they were in Vatican City or DeeCee.
Herself and I were part of a crowd guesstimated in the thousands that piled into Civic Plaza for our local Hands Off! rally, taking a raucous stand against fascism.
We carpooled with two friends to the thing, and met up with a few others at the plaza. Frankly, I was not expecting a big turnout — the “high” temperature of 43° just missed the record low, set in 1983, by a single degree — but I was delighted to be proven unsmart as per usual.
In Bibleburg it was easy to think we were the only libtards in town, though we knew better; it just felt that way sometimes. As in almost always, especially during election years.
In Duck!Burg, we’re surrounded by fellow travelers — but even here, with the endless cascade of caca pouring out of DeeCee, some days it seems that no umbrella, no matter how all-encompassing, can keep the stink off you.
So, yeah — even I, Captain Cynicism, was moved to see the throng hooting and hollering along with emcee Robert Luke, legendary activist Dolores Huerta, Mayor Tim Keller, former Interior Secretary turned gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland, state Attorney General Raúl Torrez, former Albuquerque poet laureate Mary Oishi, and others.
Better than nothing, but only barely.
There were so many excellent, creative, handmade signs in evidence that I regretted dogging it and downloading prefabs from the Hands Off! people. My faves included “Shut Your Heil Hole,” the ever-popular “Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus,” and “Deport This Pendejo,” with an image of everyone’s favorite Swasticar salesman. There was even an excellent “Chingatumaga” placard, which we praised to its grinning creator.
So, props to Hands Off! and their partners for pulling off this nationwide dance party, which grabbed a whole lot of headlines. Now, the question is … where do we go from here? Or as that old troublemaker V.I. Lenin put it, “What is to be done?”
Understatement of the year. But it’s only March 5.
Congress is like a drunk dad watching as his sugar-crazed rug monkey tips over a display of Easter treats at an understaffed Walmart, wondering whether he should deal harshly with the little shit, blame it on the ex, or just hit the door running.
And no, we did not watch last night’s episode of “The Worst Wing.” I use the word “episode” in its medical sense, “an occurrence of a usually recurrent pathological abnormal condition.”
No, instead we watched the new Robert De Niro vehicle, “Zero Day,” in which the smart Black lady is president. (In this instance, Art does not imitate Life.)
But at least I didn’t already know what was going to happen in “Zero Day.”
You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to call the play on Zero’s Day in DeeCee.
Zero was going to rave like a poorly raised toddler. The Repugs were going to find it all oh-so-cute. And the Donks were going to be as bold, decisive and effective as a Walmart shopper, watching the kid step out of his overflowing diaper in the produce section as dad idly thumbs his phone, and thinking, “Somebody really should do something.”
Yes, somebody should. We’re still waiting.
Guess what. Didn’t stop. And this was in 1954.
I’m not picking on Rep. Melanie Stansbury here. I’ve met her. I like her. But god damn, etc.
You don’t derail the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus train by standing on the tracks holding a tiny sign, like Wile E. Coyote. What you get there is run the fuck over. Take it from a guy who knows what it feels like to get hit by a locomotive.
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.
Mad Blog Media 