I am afraid to linger over anything on my Facebook feed for more than about a second and a half. Otherwise I’ll be flooded with nothing but Nazi fighter planes and videos of crocodile vs. wildebeest. Three thousand years of Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman-Rennaissance-Enlightenment-Romanticist-Realist-Impressionist-Modernist art and thought have come down to this. Crocodile vs. wildebeest.
If Donald Trump wins the election and institutes his police state, I’ll be in big trouble if anyone outside of close friends and family reads this blog. In other words, I’m perfectly safe.
Speaking of the Man from Queens Who Would be King, The Republican Party is now led by his personal ally and his daughter-in-law. Just when this country really needs the wicked old party of communist hating, petro-billions-backed, backroom cigar-smoking, bible-thumping, electoral-map-manipulating good ole boys to stand up for itself, it just rolls over and surrenders to some obnoxious yokel from New York. Maybe you can explain it to me.
Much ink has been virtually spilled recently over Joe Biden’s mental capacity. But what about the rest of us? According to a recent article in the New York Times, “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?,” Americans are having trouble remembering all the awful things said and done by Donald Trump, from the “illegal immigrants are mainly drug dealers and rapists” announcement of his first presidential candidacy to his attempt to end the democratic experiment on January 6, 2021, and everything in between. Maybe the whole country should check in to a “memory center.” I think there’s a nice one in Sweden where you get to waltz with schoolchildren in the common room on Tuesday afternoons and on Sundays you can pet a baby goat.
And the Lord spake unto his (Republican) people: Lo, I give you a New Candidate, One who does not treat women as objects of random engropement, but is even a woman unto her own self; One who is not long in years, decrepit of posture, short-term of memory, and stumbling of speech but is youthful, slim of figure, straight of posture, healthy of mental and clear of diction; One who is not a bankrupted real-estate huckster but has spent a lifetime in Public Service; One who does not bow to kiss the hindquarters of foreign dictators but will kick them therein; Yea, one who is all these things, yet still the weaselly climate-change-denying conservative so beloved by you all. And her name is Nikki Haley. What say ye?
And the Republicans spake unto the Lord: “Nah.”
By the way, I happened to see the old film version of the musical “The Music Man” recently. It’s about a charming, seasoned con-artist who rolls into a sleepy little Iowa town. He dazzles its inhabitants with imaginary projects for bringing vitality and pride back to the moribund place, and extracts as much money as he can from the town for their completion. He plans to take the money and leg it before the hoax is revealed. But he tarries a bit too long. His past catches up with him, along with news of his swindles in other towns back up the road. But in the end, it doesn’t matter; he’s seduced the town, figuratively and (in the form of the town librarian) literally. The town believes him because they want to believe him and the flattering lies he tells them about themselves.
I used to think this movie was pretty funny. Now…not so much!
The Garden of Eaton 