The Fortnightly Rant

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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“Where is my Roy Cohn?” bleated the President in 2018. How times have changed. Now he’s got the best Roy Cohn ever. She’s young and blonde, like a Hitchcock femme fatale, and she’s exacting ruthless retribution as his Attorney General. Still, it feels like something’s missing, though neither Trump nor Bondi seem to have noticed. She’s a General, right? So why is she out of uniform? Perhaps our disappointment stems from reading too many pulp magazines in our youth: stuff like the famous “Man’s Life,” of “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” fame, whose covers often featured lithe, long-legged dolls with whips, wearing a half-unbuttoned black Nazi …

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Well, here we are: a fortnight into freefall, and still no government in sight. In a manner of speaking, that is. Just try walking out of a bank with a bundle of somebody else’s Franklins. The truth is that—and this has always been the case—the rules are the rules, until they aren’t, and the rules apply to us all, until the time they don’t. If there’s any difference between today and a month ago, it’s this: things are more like they are now than they have ever been.* Israel suspended its genocide against Palestinians earlier this week. Not officially, of course, because according to Israel, …

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