ages ago, when Republicans were doubt-
ing him as an indiscreet image of their
dreams of dominance. He hadn’t yet pen-
etrated the sanctum, but he had certain-
ly defiled it to their level. Now that
they’ve inserted him, the question an-
swers itself: you wind him up, and you
get an experience which reason and re-
ality have always denied you. Bigness.
He enjoyed a conspicuously wound-up day
on Tuesday, revealing visions of things
to come by legally, once his henchman of
the previous night’s investiture had been
installed in the court of last resort. He
bestowed one of his revoltingly self-indul-
gent pardons on a couple of goons out of
his horde’s “Second Amendment” fantasies,
jumped-up claimants to non-existent rights
whose acts George Washington would have
crushed (and did) without a second thought.
He went on, to strip the agency almost bare
of funds, charged with informing the public
of its rights to health care, to refresh his
drooling claque with putrefaction much too
rich to be saliva. And then, heigh-ho, it’s
off to Belgium he would go, to smear resis-
tance to his sneer with the same foul paste.
Over the weekend, a right-twice-a-day sage,
Maureen Dowd, icebreakingly analogized Donny
Thump-Thump to an addict, who has addicted
himself to his flock’s adulation. In the im-
potence sweepstakes, addicts and sex toys
share a lot in common, always granting sen-
sation to account for most of it. Sensation,
that is, which Thomas Jefferson famously in-
sisted was the highest intellectual attain-
ment of his slaves, compared with his genetic
gift of reflection. A sex toy, we would say,
doesn’t really care what effect it procures;
it merely exists to be used. So far as we’ve
been told, this one’s users are Republicans.
In crushing the right of health care, exalt-
ing arms against a lawful, lenient government,
and blocking every exit from their policies in
legislatures and in courts, where does their
taste rest, for enslavement? What do addic-
tion and the perpetuum mobile lack in common,
which could ever threaten a user's bigness?
Alexander Calder
Poster
LACMA
1965
Nicole Eisenman
Riding Down the River
on the Jawbone of an Ass
2004
Guercino
detail
Capitoline Museum
1622
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