Man, as if to prove the point I made in yesterday’s post, several observers sitting around the big table at the back office of this communications colossus, Hopscotch Coffee, got visibly and audibly itchy when it sank in that I’d characterized President Gag as “bright and clever.”
He’s not smart was the consensus. This even after I reminded them I’d caveat-ed that L’il Duce is far from an intellectual. No matter, came the retorts. Calling him something even remotely positive, I realized, is forbidden.
And then you should have seen the reaction when I opined that the Leader of the Free World probably has ADHD. This after they leveled the popular charges that P. Gag is illiterate and/or suffering senile dementia. I countered he simply seems to be in too much of a frenzy to sit and read — ergo ADHD. As for the senility charge, he’s been acting the same way since as far back as the ’80s when I first started reading about him in Spy magazine.
My arguments were no-goes.
Ah, well. How ’bout if I make everybody happy? Here goes: It is my considered opinion that our Fearless Leader is illiterate, inhuman, not of this Earth, hates dogs, eats babies, steals from blind beggars, owns slaves, gasses Jews, rapes women…, wait, come to think of it….
The President Of The United States Of America
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The War Comes To Big Talk
Does it even register with most people these days that this holy land is still entangled in a war? Our town’s war correspondent, Doug Wissing, is an expert on the blood and treasure pit that is Afghanistan. The war there, says Wissing, remains America’s biggest foreign entanglement expense.
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Doug’ll be joining me in the studio next week for the March 2nd edition of Big Talk. The next installment of “Big Mike’s B-town” in the Limestone Post will focus on him and the book as well. Say, why don’t you hop on over to the Book Corner and cop a copy of Hopeless But Optimistic: Journeying Through America’s Endless War in Afghanistan now?
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Wrong Color
Sunday, Joe Varga has pointed out, was the 75th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order to toss Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.
In America
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Citizens of German ancestry in the United States joined bunds, swore allegiance to their “fatherland,” and staged huge rallies in cities all across the nation in the lead-up to WWII. They were not herded behind barbed-wire fences. I wonder why.
Race — for something that doesn’t technically exist, it sure has played a huge role in human history.
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Mightier Than The Sword?
From Emily Nussbaum’s piece in The New Yorker about the sitcom genesis of the President Gag phenomenon:
Growing up a Jewish kid in the nineteen-seventies, in a house full of Holocaust books, giggling at Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists.
How about that last image? Guthrie actually hung this label on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”
Guthrie And His Weapon
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We liberals like to fool ourselves that songs or novels or movies — or in Nussbaum’s recollection, jokes — are magic bullets that’ll make everything in the world right. Matt Taibbi nailed it a few years ago when he pointed out that only liberals could walk out of the movie theater after watching a documentary and think they’d somehow made the world a better place.
Which of us hasn’t heard a friend or acquaintance rave about a Michael Moore doc or an op/ed in the New York Times, and conclude, “If only the people who watch Fox News could just see (or read or listen to) this!” Which of us, for that matter, hasn’t said the same damned thing ourselves?
Big Mike tip: It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than songs, novels, movies, and jokes to upend the crazy world of P. Gag. They’re good starting points, though.
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Strange Bedfellows
“The first thing that dictators do is shut down the free press. We need to learn from history.” — John McCain
When a guy like John McCain is your best and brightest hope to fight the power, you know you’re living in a land thisclose to being a tinpot dictatorship.
'That's how dictators get started': @SenJohnMcCain defends the free press in exclusive @MeetThePress interview pic.twitter.com/yUINj0plIU
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) February 18, 2017
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Big Mike,
I don’t know if you actually read these, but here’s my take on how this might go down. I imagine it to occur Caine Mutiny style… Strawberry Ice Cream, pilfered key, juggling silver balls in the palm. Total breakdown. Your imput?
In private business, he was able to make anyone who displeased him disappear. He can’t do that in government. So, yeah, you’re on to something: the question is, who will be his Lt. Steve Maryk (Van Johnson)?
The diagnosis of attention deficit disorder makes more sense than anything else I have read. Trump is no dummy,and he is shrewd and cunning, but he is butt-ignorant about history and world affairs. He probably can’t focus long enough to read any long narrative, such as a book or long-form article, and prefers brief memos or face-to-face verbal updates.
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