We can’t speak for our two dozen predecessors, but since assuming the throne—editors traditionally use the royal “we,” why shouldn’t regal nomenclature extend to office furniture?—our natural condition has been existential dread.
That yawning abyss which strikes terror in most hearts, is like an Olympic pool to Katie Ledecky. Existential dread is our natural habitat. Perhaps it comes from having survived 267 years—so far!—despite revolution, civil war, and capitalism. Expecting the worst, we’re surprised and amused on those occasions when it does not arrive.
We bring this up because we fear we may now have to prepare for something for which we know we’re not ready. News reports are suggesting that a small but strategically important slice of the electorate may have begun perceiving reality more clearly recently, despite a still-lingering fog of bullshit.
What this means, as we go to press, is that future control of the Executive Branch may not be irretrievably lost to the Party of Goons. It may, instead, be a tossup.
We attribute some of this relatively good news to the Democratic candidates. Instead of doing their usual thing—boring their electorate to death with abstruse policy proposals based on obscure theories—they now seem to be saying that they’re going to take the fight to the sons of bitches who’ve been looting the country for half a century. Hell, they may even try to make it less difficult to slog from one paycheck to the next.
Some credit for this change in the zeitgeist must go, of course, to the GOP—or, if you prefer, the POG—for continuing to back the same bankrupt perv who, less than four years ago, whipped a mob into a lethal frenzy in a brazen attempt to steal a presidential election and hang his vice president.
In a half-sane country, a competent party would beg to have such a lunatic for an opponent. Some Republicans are literally calling the same individual their savior. And this country, until a few weeks ago, seemed quite willing to give him a mulligan. How in the roaring hell is it possible, in the 21st century, for such a set of conditions to exist?
Oops. We answered our own question.
Thanks to progress, wealthy, self-satisfied press barons—like our own F.W. Hartford, owner of this newspaper and the Portsmouth Herald from the 1890s until his death in 1938—can no longer reap fat profits while imposing his bourgeois values on a captive audience.
Classified advertising departments were like private mints. Then came Craigslist. In just few years, that was history. Display advertising wasn’t quite as vulnerable, but its revenue stream, once a Piscataqua, is now Hodgdon Brook.
Nor can staid old duffers like Walter Cronkite establish the boundaries of the nation’s consciousness. Similar technical advances have replaced Uncle Walter with a whole array of people whose greatest achievements would formerly have been attained as insufferable high school bullies.
These two-bit cranks would matter less were not for the flaws of the few news titans still standing. We’re looking at you, New York Times.
The first paragraph of a story published on August 7th:
“Senator JD Vance of Ohio accused Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Wednesday of quitting the Army National Guard two decades ago to avoid being deployed to Iraq and of exaggerating his service record to claim falsely that he had served in combat.”
If the Times’s editors really felt compelled to lead with that, at least they could have followed up in the second paragraph by accurately reporting that Walz retired after serving 24 years in the National Guard, months before his unit got orders to Iraq. Instead, the Times fed readers some commentary on the horse race:
“Both provocative charges amounted to some of the sharpest Republican attacks yet on the Minnesota governor, and appeared aimed at disrupting what has been a run of positive news coverage of the Democratic ticket since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden as the party’s nominee.”
By rigorously holding both parties to the same standard, the Times invited everyone to stand on the ramparts and lie through a bullhorn about their opponents supposed lack of selfless heroism. Republicans promptly accepted. We suspect their ability to do this depends on their pervasive inability to perceive irony.
People are asking—has anyone ever seen Trump laugh? Yes, we can imagine him guffawing if someone near him suddenly got hurt. But that’s just sadism. We’ve always suspected him of that.
More than anything else, what has us feeling cautiously optimistic these days is what seems like an emerging tendency for relatively sane Americans to respond to this tiresome, tedious, predictable bunch of boors with the one thing against which they have no defense: a horselaugh. For example, Barack Obama, at the convention, talking about #45’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” while subtly mimicking #45 characteristic gesture of playing an invisible accordion. And Jamie Raskin, calling JD Vance Trump’s “pet chameleon.”
If we are doomed, let’s at least enjoy the process.