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.
“I hate to get hit myself as it digs a hole you don’t quite get out of for a couple of weeks.” — Brown Dog in “The Seven-Ounce Man,” by Jim Harrison
Brown Dog, a.k.a. B.D., didn’t burn a lot of daylight worrying about politics or getting his ass kicked.
He got drawn into both from time to time, as we all do. But they didn’t leave any lasting marks on him. Not for long, anyway.
Preparing to do battle with a couple of bruisers whose women he’d been romancing B.D. mused that “it wasn’t likely to be the end of the world, just a real expensive way to pay for getting laid a few times.”
All the world cares about, his grandfather once told him, is that you get to work on time.
Well. Shit. We got boned and beat up last Tuesday. I still feel as though I’m down in that hole, but I guess it’s time to get back to work.
The hummingbird feeders are going back in the closet for now.
The quail are laying low. The hummingbirds have flown south. Yet one bird remains, flying more or less daily at the elaborate altars to fascism that The Duck! City MAGgots construct in their front yards.
I prefer the actual birds to the gnarly old featherless talon I flip to the yard signs, banners, and flags of the FreeDummies as I bicycle past their fauxdobe compounds in the foothills. Simultaneously a departure from and a riff on the traditional Halloween decor from China via Walmart, I suppose — but I like my goblins a little less, y’know, real. Y’know?
Now and then it seems I’ve pedaled into some hideous Mike Judge-Tim Burton reboot of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
Linus, who considers himself an intellectual but gets his news and analysis from Facebook and NextDoor, pesters Pendleton about adding a Kevlar “Security Blanket” to its line. He wants one for his annual Halloween stint in the pumpkin patch, just in case another assassin decides to have a go at the Great Pumpkin, assuming he actually shows up.
Charlie Brown is an “independent” (unless you count Social Security and Medicare). It’s a convenient political fiction that means he hasn’t got the stones to put a “Pumpkin 2024” sign in his yard for fear of offending the Little Red-Haired Girl, who has long since married someone with a job and a future.
Not so Schroeder, the lone clone of an unrepentant Nazi who fled Germany as the Allies closed in; he plays “The Horst Wessel Song” on a toy piano while gazing soulfully at a framed, life-size, autographed photo of the Great Pumpkin cheating at squash.
Lucy is now a brittle bottle blonde who’s “had some work done” to keep her job as a screeching harridan for Fox News. These days she kicks balls rather than snatching them away from Charlie Brown.
Peppermint Patty (field-hockey coach) and Marcie (librarian) share a one-bedroom apartment with a dozen or so rescue cats and not nearly enough ventilation. But plenty of joy.
Pig-Pen is actually Steve Bannon (because of course he is). He had planned a live podcast from the big Halloween party until the FCI Danbury warden refused to honor his “Get Out of Jail Free” card from the Goldman Sachs’ edition of “Monopoly,” in which all properties are Park Place and only poor people go to jail.
And Snoopy is an undercover K-9 informing on all of them to the FBI.
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