The Fortnightly Rant

Well, let’s see here…2020, subtract 1776…yup, looks like tomorrow, the Fourth of July, will mark this country’s 244th birthday. How shall we celebrate? We understand that El Presidente will be visiting South Dakota. Flying in on Air Force One is his subtle way of letting us know that he thinks his face belongs on Mount Rushmore. After all, what has Lincoln done for anyone lately? It pains us to say this, but in a way he’s right. After all, the so-called “Shrine of Democracy” is a grandiose monument created by a monomaniacal racist on land stolen by the government from the Sioux. Some Sioux have …

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Twelve score and four years ago, smugglers, land grabbers, farmers, and shoe makers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in a curiously narrow vision of Liberty, and dedicated—nominally—to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great difference of opinion, testing whether that nation can endure much longer while ten Army posts continue to honor the names of men who fought against it in a great Civil War. It would be altogether fitting and proper for us the living to re-dedicate those places. We could give them new names, in honor of others—men, or women, who …

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Eleven days ago, on Memorial Day, four Minneapolis police officers killed a man. One choked the life out of George Floyd by putting a knee on his neck. Two others helped by holding him down. The fourth stood watch. One more black man killed by men in blue. It’s not a new story. It’s so familiar, in fact, that one could argue it wasn’t even news. On the other hand, during this hyper-quantified era in which refrigerators can remotely report to homeowners how many eggs they are holding at any given time, this would certainly seem to be a number of which someone ought to …

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Officially, as of Tuesday afternoon, more than 1.5 million Americans were confirmed to have been infected by the coronavirus. More than 90,000 have died. Those are the figures we have to work with, anyway. We know that both numbers will only rise. That goes without saying for the death toll, of course, because life is a one-way street. These days, though, with more than 1,200 people dying every day from the virus, the mortality department’s accountants can no more keep up than Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory. The number of total cases is also a moving target; with new people getting infected every …

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According to a chart made public Tuesday by the White House Council of Economic Advisors—certainly an assemblage of experts in their field, and what field could be more relevant than economics?—the U.S. daily death rate from Covid-19 should be dropping to zero in about a week. How fortunate we are to have Donald Trump as our President—as he explained to the nation at length on Sunday from the Lincoln Memorial. The former owner of the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant clearly feels a special affinity for that stately structure. Before he was even inaugurated he used its steps—from which Martin Luther King once delivered a speech …

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In times as terrible as these—the news cycle dominated by daily infomercials featuring a clearly addled mountebank praising his own homicidally ham-fisted response to a lethal pandemic; the global economy wheezing like a chain-smoker in the Tour de France; choruses of ignored scientists chanting a litany of pending but unaddressed environmental catastrophes; and, apparently, no baseball—we must keep our heads, and strive to accomplish whatever good we can. As one small step toward that end, we propose the abolition of the term “intelligent design.” Intelligent design, as we all know, is a weasel-phrase engineered to insinuate religion into our public schools under an assumed name. …

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