The Fortnightly Rant

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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Our newsroom, every time we publish, stands briefly poised between two fortnights, one just past, and one to come. Two weeks ago, the calendar caused that transition to occur on Halloween, the day—or night—when the mundane rubs up against the mystical. Some subtle synergy between those cycles apparently induced a state of irrational editorial exuberance. For a brief, joyous moment, certain members of the staff were convinced that the nation was about to break out of its moral, political, and economic crash dive, and begin to level off; the Republic would soon be spared, before it augers in. A real-world event sparked this extravagant hope: …

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