Saturday, October 27, 2018

Patient Zero speaks out






    How right the President was when
    he announced that the worst fact
    about distributing bombs by post
    was how people caught themselves
    worrying about it instead of his
    latest nightmare. Yes, they rea-
    soned, the worst thing about any
    social disease, is the hope with
    which it was incurred. Very sad.

















Friday, October 26, 2018

Open to the public






    The nation is accepting
    responsibility for the
    today. This gesture to
    his surviving family is
    not to be disparaged. I
    know of no one who will
    regard this courtesy as
    of every person living
    under the nation's law.
























Has anyone ever known such bliss?


What heaven it is when reverberations
from Twain and Liebling echo down our
aural canal, with tirades against dem-
ocracy such as emerged from the post-
sovereign State of Georgia this week.





How wrong, how unjust, how beneath a
demagogue's dignity it would be, for
any of us to deny what hilarity must
be credited to Republican efforts to
suppress the vote with mechanisms so
indebted to torches and little hoods
as to make us gasp with raptest awe.

Pricelessly, yet exuberantly stuffed
with tomfoolery of halcyon days, the
torrent of fraud now pours from that
Party's gubernatorial candidate, who
labors at his day job to supervise a
fair election. Oh, children! All who
mourned, they missed the theft of an
election in Florida in the same mode
in 2000, must rise from their torpor
to applaud the most perfect thievery
of the ballot since Scalia rescued a
Bush to bring us the surveillance of
our patriotism. And to think, a wom-
an of slave ancestry is his nemesis!




But now, so shrewd is this luminary,
not to deride her gender or her race
for pitching the State into a pit of
universal enfranchisement, but rath-
er to blame the Real Malefactors, an
axis of San Francisco socialists and
New York billionaires. What, off the
top of your head, sounds more Jewish
than that, but the President's warn-
ing of malevolent international fin-
anciers when he gained his election?

Aren't they clever, our kindly ones?




















ii  Eudora Welty, photography
    Home Before Dark
    Blacks expelled before sundown,
    every day of their lives, Jackson, MS
    1935


Jonathan Littell
The Kindly Ones
Harper Collins, 2006, 2009©


Victor Klemperer
I Will Bear Witness
  A diary of the Nazi years
  1933 - 1941
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998©








Thursday, October 25, 2018

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Origins of Wednesday lxxxiii: Time to reboot






   With many soothsayers declaring now
   how Darius has bewitched all of At-
   tica, it's good to recall the power
   of playing fair, by summoning it. A
   contest can still be won or lost by

   













Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Home, home on the range




Has anyone else been noticing the
recurring burbling in the classic
cassoulet of nativist paranoia,
on the evils of pedestrian migra-
tion to this sacred melting pot?

It was not ever thus, of course.
Pedestrian migrations were cel-
ebrated, before the emancipation
of slaves, in regular compulsory
expulsions of undesired Americans,
to various deserts not yet covet-
ed by the boaters and their des-
cendants, for their oil and gas
or railhead potential. Through
it all, however, transit on foot
has marked a populace with disfa-
vor, stigmatizing the stroll as
an act of such outcaste indecency,
as to ostracize the practitioner.






Not since Andrew Jackson have
Americans enjoyed the Presid-
ency of so avenging an angel of
this cassoulet, as the incumbent

Famed for his devotion to ham
hocks, his adoration for the
white bean is reciprocated even
more ebulliently by the longest
to swelter in his marmite. His
great project, like that of the 
beans, is to sustain the horiz-
ontal layering of the cassoulet
against the vertical inevitabil-
ity of its burbling evolution.
This lends his passions a truly
fatal air, widely apprehended
by his cherished, sodden beans.





One senses, through the turmoil
this upstart Jackson brings to
the protectorate of white beans,
that there must be some obscure
complication in their resistance
to the laws of physics - beneath,
that is, their corruption of na-
tionhood and faith to conceal it.
Various gurus murmur along think-
tank lines, of North-South versus
East-West forces of upheaval or
renewal, depending on the bean.

But insofar as they cannot bring
themselves to migrate to a waste
land of their own, cannellinis
think only to hoist the marmite
from its flame, or by closing it,
enjoy the thrill of its explosion.
Simple operation of steam, really.