The Fortnightly Rant

It had been so long since there had been any good news that it came as quite a shock: Fox News had fired Tucker Carlson. There is a limit to what one might reasonably expect from the firing of a single demagogue. The Former Guy was evicted from the Oval Office more than 27 months ago. Bill O’Reilly, Carlson’s own predecessor, has been gone for six years. Yet here we are, still on the brink of a dozen different catastrophes. But what the hell—it’s a start. Let us be grateful for what we’ve been given. Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll fade forever from public view. …

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Three good things might be said about the fortnight which just ended: 1) It’s over; 2) We won’t have to go through it again; 3) It may help clarify the nature of the power structure in our much-vaunted, supposedly democratic republic. Two statements are sufficient to sum up how most people in this country stand in relation to our justice system: they are protected by it and unrestrained; or, they are restrained by it and unprotected. At the very apex of this justice system, doing his level best to assure that it stays the way it is—or becomes even more unjust—sits Clarence Thomas, on a …

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A little over forty years ago—on January 18, 1983, to be exact—the U.S. of A. hit the skids. “Ridiculous,” you may say. “Nothing is that simple.” And you would be right, of course. Nothing ever is that simple. But, like Schrödinger’s famous feline—which is simultaneously dead and alive thanks to quantum mechanics—you would also be wrong. Though it is absurdly simplistic, our opening statement is also true. This vexing state of affairs is the consequence of a phenomenon we’ll call quantum politics. What is true for one person may be false to another. Facts are matters of opinion, and opinions are matters of fact. Routine, …

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Watching Vladimir and Estragon on a nearly bare stage as they wait for Godot can, paradoxically, be a thrilling experience. Waiting for Merrick Garland to slap the cuffs on The Former Guy, on the other hand, is beginning to get tedious. Talk about pent-up demand. If Ticketmaster could sell seats to a DJT Perp Walk, its ensuing collapse would make last year’s Taylor Swift fiasco look like business as usual. And yet, we wait…and wait…. What—a seething nation might ask, boiling over in exasperation, had it not already been beaten down by a bitter succession of past disappointments—is the #@$&ing hold up? Being about as …

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It goes without saying, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, that things are, in general, hunky-dory. Such, at least, is the baseline which—though unspoken—serves as the foundation of our national news, as it is presented by the preeminent purveyors of that particular product. Against that static and unchanging background, over time, a succession of events occur. To euphemize a vulgar old expression, “Stuff happens.” These events need to be observed, assessed, and calmly described by properly trained people if we are to fulfill our roles as decent, responsible human beings living, whether we like it or not, in …

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For a century and a half the Republican Party has been symbolized by the elephant. “As characters,” says Wikipedia, “elephants are most common in children’s stories, in which they are generally cast as models of exemplary behaviour. They are typically surrogates for humans with ideal human values.” Two years ago a Republican President whipped up a mob of hooligans and paramilitary fantasists who fought their way into the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government by force—an act of treason, no matter how you slice it. Ever since, the erstwhile Party of Lincoln has pulled out every rhetorical stop, employing its unequaled powers …

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