The Fortnightly Rant

It’s true. It’s all true. A police state is being built before our eyes. Peaceful people are being shot dead on the streets. The highest ranking* guy in the Executive Branch has sent a squad of his own private cops, formerly known as the FBI, to Fulton County, Georgia, to confiscate 700 boxes of damning evidence†—ballots, voter rolls, and tabulator tapes. The pattern is clear: seize power and end our democratic experiment—perversely, on the 250th Anniversary of its birth. Yet, we are buoyantly optimistic. What could explain such a paradoxical state of mind? Perhaps the item in question has finally been lost. Hear us out, …

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Well, here we are now, one year into the second four-year term of a president who, if he must say so himself, is the most powerful superlative magnet the human race has ever seen. Not even his worst, most hateful critics—a category in which we must declare a certain interest—can deny it. Who, in recorded history, has ever done more to aggrandize himself? No one. If anyone had, his name—it would have to have been a man, after all—would be on everyone’s lips, and we would know it by the vigorous wiping of those lips to remove it. He is the biggest. Taft might have …

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So much for any hope that the cavalry might come to the rescue of the republic. In November, New Hampshire’s Maggie Goodlander and five other Members of Congress, all with backgrounds in the military or national security, made a video in which they reminded active duty service members that they have a right and and a duty to refuse illegal orders. They didn’t record the video on a whim. The Trump administration had been blowing up boats for months, killing scores of people. As yet, there has been no reckoning for anyone involved, from the trigger-pullers up to the very top of the chain of …

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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 …

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We are so old that we remember when the news was more than a litany of catastrophic policy decisions and constant scandals. Can you blame us for feeling a twinge of nostalgia? On a recent, random, all-too-typical morning, in half an hour, on a now-defunded radio network, we learned that automotive fuel consumption standards were being lowered, a federal health panel had voted to give hepatitis B a second chance to kill babies, and former frontline allies are being deported to face almost certain death. Is this relentless series of destructive decisions just the inevitable result of handing the federal government over to a cadre …

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Long-time readers may have noticed that at this newspaper, we tend to expect the worst.* Even so, count us among those who did not expect the President to threaten to hang Maggie Goodlander. This seems as good a time as any to raise a formal complaint: if our government is going to run as if it were a Monty Python sketch,† why is it not funnier? Sadly, current events force us to turn aside from John Cleese, Eric Idle, and the rest of that merry gang, and turn to a grimmer Englishman. If you really want to be frightened, imagine trying to navigate today’s world …

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