Two weeks ago today, a person whose name has become nearly impossible to avoid spoke to a gaggle of other geriatrics at The Villages, a Golfer’s Valhalla in Florida. We refer, of course, to the President of the purportedly United States of America, who, lest we forget, inexplicably won a second term in 2024, despite having ended his terrible first term by fomenting an insurrection to overthrow an election he lost.
Since the median age of the residents there is 73 years, and 97 percent of them are white, our Chief Executive must have felt right at home in this peculiar institution. For the record, we have no objection to that. We’d be happy to see any institution take him, just so long as they keep him.
Clearly he felt free to speak his mind, such as it is. But then, where does he not? Some say he is the most garrulous geezer who ever bored anyone to tears while simultaneously frightening them out of their wits.
Under the unfortunate terms of their employment, some journalists are forced to pore over the flood of gibberish which seems to constantly emanate from this man’s pie-hole. Every day we send heart-felt thanks to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that we are not among them.
As befits the dignity of The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper,™ we rely instead on an Acme Irony Detector which is firmly bolted to the bedrock in a sub-basement under our newsroom. A fortnight ago exactly, this rugged, cast-iron device shuddered and broke when, some 1,200 miles away, Donald J. Trump spoke. He said, “… you get a guy, he gets in there, he’s got a good line of crap, he gets in, and all of a sudden you’re stuck with a man who’s a moron. This is not good. This is not good.”
Replacement parts for the Acme are now on order. Unfortunately, they’re stranded aboard a ship trapped in the Strait of Hormuz. However—and let us be perfectly clear about this—we are not in the least bit worried. We expect those parts will arrive soon, along with shiploads of oil, fertilizer, rare earths, helium, and all the other raw materials upon which our global economy depends.
Why do we say this? Because during his speech warning us of the dangers of having himself for a president, he also said that when people say “we’re not winning,” that “It’s actually, it’s actually… I believe it’s treasonous. You wanna know the truth? It’s treasonous.”
Frankly, when it comes to being arrested for treason by a boozed-up FBI director, and prosecuted by an Acting Attorney General subpoenaing journalists as we write this for simply doing their jobs… well, we side with Bartelby—we would prefer not to.
We have highlighted these snippets of Presidential rhetoric first and foremost to assure that they will be retained in the historical record. To do this we had to overcome a certain reticence; it requires us to expose an irrational hope, to wit: that despite current trends, there will be a future.
Also, we wanted to take advantage of a unique opportunity to calculate, to an exact degree, the prescience of the Sage of Baltimore. On July 26, 1920, H.L. Mencken wrote:
“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
We can now state that Mencken was exactly 105 years, 9 months, and 5 days ahead of his time. [That’s 2,759.28 fortnights, by the way, according to our in-house calendar. – Ed.]
Also, we did this to prove a mean and petty hunch: that, before we published this paper, some avalanche of unknowable things would have happened that were so bizarre that, by today, May 15th, these things will have been forgotten. In retrospect, we must admit that we were wrong. Far from being forgotten, these things barely registered in the first place. Steve Bannon may not currently be hanging out in the White House, but his “Flood the Zone with Bullshit” strategy has triumphed.
Let’s take a quick run-through of recent events anyway. If nothing else, we can replace old objects of dread with new and novel ones.
Take the hantavirus, for example. Seriously. Please, take it—we sure as hell don’t want it.
We apologize for sounding like a third-rate Borscht belt comic, but we’re only hearing about this deadly exotic disease because of an outbreak on the cruise ship Hondius—and what’s a cruise ship but The Villages, afloat?
Samuel Johnson famously said, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.” Of course, today’s cruise ships are nothing like Johnson’s 18th century floating jails; the odds of drowning are far lower now. But they are floating Petri dishes.
From being barely a blip on the news radar on the first of the month, a week later hantavirus had the WHO’s top pandemic-preventer saying, “this is not SARS-CoV-2 and not the start of a COVID pandemic.” Of course it’s not Covid—it’s hantavirus. Covid barely kills five percent of those infected. The rate for hantavirus is as much as ten times higher.
Oh, but don’t worry, we’re told. It doesn’t transmit as easily. That’s reassuring, since lab staff at a Dutch hospital lab had to quarantine for six weeks after mishandling samples, and known contacts have reportedly been seen hobnobbing about Europe.
It’s a free country, so anyone who wants to can trust their health to HHS Secretary Robert “Brainworm” Kennedy, Jr. and the empty desk recently vacated by Dr. Jeannie Morazzo, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectuous Diseases.
As an alternative to that, we’ll offer this URL to our readers: tinyurl.com/k4z4zr9a. It’s an 87-second clip in which Professor Joseph G. Allen, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, warns that the so-called “prolonged contact” we’re being told it takes to transmit the disease could be as little as passing someone in a hallway.
Let’s call that a relevant public service, since, according to news reports, two refugees from the Hondius, though currently under quarantine at an undisclosed location, are from New Hampshire.
In cheerier news, a brand-new statue of the golden bullshit artist himself was just unveiled at Mar-a-Lardo.