Roughly 8.2 billion humans are alive today. In some ways they are all identical, in others unique. Their variability is astonishing: a Canadian woman spent 37 years in a coma. On the other hand, we have Shohei Ohtani.
Over the 300,000 years we have wandered on this planet, we have repeatedly organized ourselves into hierarchical structures. Every hierarchy requires someone or something at the top: a king, a triumvirate, a troika, a prime minister, a dictator, a Führer… whatever. The power of this position may or may not be limited by other structures: a council, a parliament, the courts, and so on.
Geography, as much as anything, made the U.S.A. the dominant nation on Earth. Atop its hierarchy is the presidency, a position to which the other branches of our government have been ceding power for half a century. In a turn of events that must call into question the existence of a loving God, that position—which includes the capacity to rain down destruction in a manner that Zeus would envy—was regained by Donald J. Trump.
Last week the aforementioned person unveiled an embellishment to what he calls the “Walk of Fame”: a gallery of portraits of his predecessors. This purported improvement to the White House grounds—a minor act of vandalism compared to the paving of the Rose Garden and the demolition of the East Wing—was already infamous for its mocking of his immediate predecessor with a photograph of an autopen.
Now the Walk includes, beneath each portrait, what can only be described as tweets cast in bronze. Judging from their unique tone of personal resentment and unwarranted self-esteem, along with unorthodox capitalization, the texts appear to have been written by the nation’s chief executive officer himself. His own scowling mug appears twice, once for each term. Somehow, despite being less than a year into the second, in both instances his achievements have been so great as to require not one, but two slabs of bronze. Not satisfied with a juvenile sight gag, President No. 47 used the new plaque to lie, claiming Joe Biden was elected “as a result of the most corrupt election ever seen in the U.S.”
We thought of calling the White House: would New Hampshire-born Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt kindly tell us, please, what her boss had to say about the Granite State’s own Franklin Pierce? Then we thought of e.e. cummings, who wrote of Olaf, glad and big. Olaf, who said, “there is some shit I will not eat”.
We did, however, query Google AI, an environmental sin which will no doubt lengthen our stretch in purgatory. It says the plaque’s text reads, “We Polked You in ’44, We Shall Pierce You in ’52!,” and comments, “The plaque reportedly adds, ‘They don’t make slogans like that anymore, because of Woke.’”
Poor, mopey, wrong-headed, ill-starred Frank. One of the few presidents to give our incumbent any competition in the race to the bottom, and all he gets is praise for an idiotic slogan. We’ll grade that “I” for Incomplete.
Two things can be said in favor of this exercise of presidential power: 1) whatever time the world’s most powerful figure spent denigrating better men than himself was not spent doing something worse, and, 2) there’s always a market for scrap bronze.
On December 17th, the same day the Most Deeply-Flawed Man in the World made this bid to immortalize his own unsuitability for office, a former Justice Department Special Counsel testified in a closed-door session before the House Judiciary Committee.
Committee chairman Jim Jordan [R-Ohio] subpoenaed Smith earlier this month, apparently in a vain effort to uncover evidence of skulduggery carried out by members of a party not his own. Smith had volunteered to testify publicly, but that would have required him to let Democratic members ask questions—a prospect no more appealing to a MAGA cultist than line-dancing in a minefield.
Despite Jordan’s efforts to limit Smith’s rights under the First Amendment, the ‘nut graph’ of his opening statement got past the censors: “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.”
And there it was: a clear and simple answer from a duly appointed, top ranking member of the legal team officially charged with establishing who was guilty of what in the Crime of the Semiquincentennial.
The present balance of political power makes it seem unlikely that this rare instance of an important truth being publicly stated will have consequential results, but it was gratifying to see this nearly-forgotten can of radioactive worms get cracked open by one of the president’s most slavish supporters. One might argue that it’s all the more piquant, coming as it did from a man who’s tainted by a sexual abuse scandal. But then, he’s a Republican male. Perhaps that’s only to be expected.
As we here in the cheap seats wait for Nemesis to come do her thing, ol’ Hubris is still up there on the world stage. Monday he announced that the Ship of State will henceforth be a battleship.
Speaking from his Ottoman-bordello theme park in Florida, the president, who will be 80 in June, said he had ordered a “Golden Fleet” of at least twenty new battleships.
According to Navy secretary John Phelan, these “will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.”
Wait a minute… “best-looking”? What kind of criteria is that? Let’s ask the man taking up the space formerly occupied by the leader of the free world: “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.”
New ship classes like this one, which will cost nearly $200 billion altogether, are traditionally given their own names. In this case, the Commander-in-Chief has decided to name this the Trump class—because what could be classier, right? Over the past few decades, the Navy has attempted three new classes of ships. Zumwalt-class destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, and Constellation-class frigates have all been disasters. But this time, this time will be different.
Is there no respite from all this madness?
Lo: a deus ex machina! The Supreme Court unexpectedly ruled on Tuesday that the President must obey a law, and cannot unilaterally occupy Chicago. It’s something, at least.