Current Affairs
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Inasmuch "on horror's head horrors accumulate" every single Trump day, I wonder why an atrocity out of the mouth of Senator Charles Grassley (of once progressive Iowa) pisses me off to the top of my bent. Over the top, actually, even though he's probably no worse than the others. In an aha!! moment with the…
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Four years ago, I listened to a radio interview with Markwayne Mullin, a new member of the House of Representatives from eastern Oklahoma, and was absolutely flabbergasted. Astonished and dismayed, I wrote a few paragraphs about him. Here''s what I said then: "It wasn't that he was inarticulate or stupid. It was that he was…
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I wrote the following long ago, republished it once. Here it is, relevant again. What Doesn't Dick Cheney Commit Suicide? Why doesn't Dick Cheney put a bullet in his brain? It would do him (and his reputation) a world of good. What could possibly stand in his way? Once he sprinkles the ratsbane on his porridge —…
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A textbook example of the unthinkable actually happening: "It's good to be the king," says Mel Brooks (as Louis XVI) in The History of the World, Part I, lifting the skirt of one of his lovely courtieresses in order to dry-hump her. It's make-believe Hollywood pseudo-licentiousness. It's outrageous, beyond the pale, and hilarious as long…
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Elsa Morante, the distinguished Italian novelist, spent the war years in what might be called internal exile, holed up, hungry, with her friend and later husband Alberto Moravia in a one-room hut in Sant'Agata (both Morante and Moravia were half Jewish). After Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were arrested and shot, hung upside down…
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Dr. M. "How long have you been a guard here?" Guard: "Seventeen years. You can't stand still. You have to change your position, move around." Dr. M. "Has anything ever happened. Someone try to steal a painting? Guard. "No nothing. Nothing has ever happened." Dr. M. "No one descending on ropes from the ceiling, trying…
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As is well known, Vivian de St. Vrain, fully accredited prophet (Senior Fellow, American Society of Prophecy), has an unparalleled record of accurate prognostication. Vivian has once again retreated to the mountaintop and has returned with a new set of predictions for the coming year. Read and be dazzled, fit audience though few. Here's what's going to happen!…
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I asked some friends how they understood Senator Marco Rubio's very blunt statement that "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers." I received a variety of answers. My linguistically conservative friends asserted that we obviously need grammarians more than either philosophers or welders, because Rubio doesn't respect the difference between…
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Egregious Rush Limbaugh, who ranks number three on my list of the people who, in the course of my lifetime, have done the most damage to the United States of America (Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia are one and two and Dick Nixon only slithers in at number 6) speaks a language that is extraordinarily difficult to parse. His sentences…