I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this Fun Friday idea before — though I’ve gotten close.

We talk about art a lot, and that’s great. It’s one of the very few things that distinguish us from animals (like our capacity for savagery, but nicer!), and it’s source of both simple pleasure and edification; I mean the latter in the sense that, in addition to…

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If you’re on Bluesky, you can look up my posts there from the past year or so in which I have reposted news stories with the comment, “fascism is an international movement.” I’m sure you knew it was international already, because far-right leaders like Höcke in Germany, Milei in Argentina, Modi in India, et alia, are so obviously trying different mixes of the old fascist formula.

But from time to time (and believe me I haven’t nearly clocked them all) news stories pop up that show not only how fascist they are, but also how close to our own homegrown fascist movement theirs are. Like the former Honduran President’s conspiracy to work with Trump to destabilize fash-unfriendly governments like Mexico’s; Trump trying to stop Bolsonaro’s trial by threatening Brazil with tariffs; Kristi Noem pimping for Karol Nawrocki in Poland; Trump buddy and global fascist leader Musk backing Afd in Germany, etc.

But the most disturbing stuff comes out of the U.K. Or maybe I just find it so because the horrors are in English and I’ve been there a time or two. But, Jesus, what a fucking mess they are. In fact, when I despair of our own country, I look over there and think, eh, could be worse.

They seem to hate their migrants even more than our own wingnuts hate ours; in fact immigration polls worse over there than it does here, especially since Tubby fucked up with ICE, and they manage to get up the limey equivalent of a Charlottesville march every couple of weeks. Keir Starmer, in his hapless attempt to shake off vestiges of Labour’s leftist past in order to compete for the xenophobe vote, seems to have emboldened the worst of their racism. They can’t even bear to have one of their Royals married to a black foreigner!

And their press is rabid. It’s like Murdoch secretly runs every paper. And the columnists, oy. Much as I despise Bret Stephens, I wouldn’t swap him for Nick Cohen.

As with the other foreign fascists, MAGA and Musk are busily backing the British far-right leaders, Nigel Farage of Reform and Rupert Lowe of Restore — yes, even with Starmer’s trimming there’s still a big enough market for not one but two Enoch Powell impersonators in the Green and Pleasant. But they hardly seem to need the help. Like our own fascists, the Brit variety are not above braying about civil war to heighten, as it were, the contradictions and swamp the old order on behalf of Blackshirts II.

Just this week some hoods in Belfast responded to a grisly immigrant knife crime by conducting a pogrom — not in the Bari-Weiss-being-yelled-at sense, but in the real sense, menacing wrongly-complected passers-by and burning out immigrants’ homes. We have our own nonsense, but this is wild.

I bring this up because we’re rolling into the 4th of July zone, which I guess kicks off with Tubby’s stupid cage match thing, and I hear from the comrades that they’re not feeling very much like celebrating the 250^th anniversary of 1776 under the circumstances. I sympathize. Trump can fuck up a wet dream and his grotesque posturing, treating our sacred holiday as if it’s the kickoff of a giant used car sale, puts me off too.

But while he and his goons are rasslin’ I expect I’ll be recreating and drinking and picnicking thinking about what America really is — the good, the bad, and the redeemable. There’s something about the occasion that, for me, always makes thinking seriously about this country seem more worthwhile. And why should I change? They’re the ones who suck.

Plus, look at it this way: If we hadn’t declared independence, we’d be in a real mess right now.

L.A. city councilwoman Nithya Raman’s second-place finish in the L.A. mayoral primary means that she’ll face current Mayor Bass in the runoff election, with rightwing former reality star Spencer Pratt running third and out of the money. As you may have noticed, many prominent conservatives have more or less declared Raman’s victory a (bet you already guessed!) stolen election.

Ah, for the dear, dead days when charges of election tampering would be either completely couched in ass-covering language or backed up with evidence. But we live in the tertiary stage of Trumpism, where lies and truth are interchangeable, so these guys just let fly.

Trump set the tone (“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had, 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” Note: Pratt did not have a big lead.) His factota raced to back him up and, when challenged for evidence, said they didn’t need no stinkin’ evidence. “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” oozed House Speaker Mike Johnson. “But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise gave us this gibberish:

Elon Musk pimped these claims and the rightwing small-timers were off to the races. “Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Nithya Raman really did, unlikely as it seems, got to second place in the LA mayoral race,” equivocated Rod Dreher. “The problem is that many, many, MANY of us simply cannot believe it. It seems for all the world like fraud. This matters, & is going to matter more.” Just The Tip Trumper status retained!

A few poor ink-stained editorial-side operatives put a smidge of effort into it. Kelly Sadler of the Washington Times claimed it was “simply not mathematically or statistically realistic” that Raman would get more of a boost in late mail-in ballots than first-place candidate Karen Bass — which is nonsense, because why wouldn’t one candidate get more mail-in votes than another? She also said “online buzz suggested that Mr. Pratt, an independent, could make the runoff and secure the No. 2 spot,” suggested that Raman got a lot of votes from Skid Row bums, and had as her subhead “Democrats just stole an election.” Well, you use the tools you have, I guess.

You could explain why this result was actually foreseeable in a city with very few Republicans to people who claim to believe it was fixed. But it probably won’t do any good.

But not because the MAGA people who repeat these stolen elections claims are conspiracy theorists, as people often say. I think it’s simpler than that.

I confess that my own first instinct has been, whenever I’ve seen these folks scream their alternative versions of what you, I, and other normal people see when we gaze upon objective reality, to assume that they’ve been mesmerized by some Pepe Silvia backstory they saw on the internet, perhaps involving the Illuminati, the CIA, Jade Helm, or such like.

Haven’t we all read The Paranoid Style in American Politics? Aren’t we always hearing about their vulnerability to conspiracy theories?

Well. I know there are a lot of people peddling conspiracy theories. And you might hear some of the MAGA peeps parrot those tropes, like the RFK Jr. fans who talk about 5G and microchips.

But I have come to the conclusion that these people don’t actually believe in those theories even when they repeat them.

I can’t prove it. (Maybe I’m paranoid and a conspiracist myself!) But though I think these people have made some political decisions that strike me as harebrained, experience — especially since they returned Tubby and his mob to office — tells me they are not confused or conspiracy-addled: They’re voting for what they were offered and wanted all along, namely official suppression and immiseration of minorities and women and a fun show of belligerence whenever their boy goes on TV. They’re also getting higher prices and foreign war, but hey, pobody’s nerfect. (I didn’t want Obama to bomb Syria either.)

I think that for them the conspiracy theories associated with MAGA are pleasing to repeat, like curse words and folk tales, but not articles of faith.

Conspiracy theory tropes are something they can say when people ask, or when they ask themselves, what they believe, besides “I just don’t like [insert slur(s) here]” and “I don’t have any real beliefs, only appetites.” (In this they’re like conservative op-ed writers, except they have sense enough not to put so much effort into the subterfuge.)

Think about one of the weirder types of Trump II initiative: The release, with much fanfare, of records pertaining to incidents associated with conspiracies, like the JFK files and the UFO files.

Neither of those has revealed anything very interesting. His fans were briefly excited, and then just sort of let it go. If they really believed that these files contained long-buried truths that only Trump had the guts to bring to light, and then they turned out to be a series of Capone’s Vaults, don’t you think they’d be livid, and loudly wonder who got to the President? I would have expected some podcaster to have launched a 2028 presidential exploratory on the basis of these cover-ups by now.

No. These conspiracy theories were just something to talk about instead of the things they didn’t want to say out loud.

Now, there turned out to be one conspiracy theory the Trumpkins dangled that got out of hand: The Epstein Files. Remember how excited MAGA was about that? Idiots like DC Draino and Chaya Raichik dancing around with boxed sets with the Presidential Seal they got from Pam Bondi? Unfortunately for them it broke containment, for one simple reason: While the Kennedy conspiracy and Area 51 are bullshit, Epstein really fucked kids and Trump was in there with him. Much safer to entertain the rubes with White House rasslin’!

So no, they don’t believe that Democrats somehow kept a Republican from winning an election in an 80-plus-percent Democratic city. Most of them aren’t that stupid. They’re just deceitful and justifiably ashamed.

Update, June 13;:And right on time, Tubby kicks out more boob-bait.

© 2013 Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license

One of the problems with living in the Age of LOL Nothing Matters — or maybe (dare we hope?) a short time after that Age, short enough that we have not noticed yet that it’s over and Things are gonna start to Matter again soon — is that we may rush too quickly past the comeuppances of assholes.

N…

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[As seen in “Bari the Lede,” “what looks like a private dining room at Delmonico’s at the turn of the 20th Century, but is in fact part of a suite of BARI WEISS’ offices at CBS News.” BARI WEISS and her lieutenant OLIVIA REINGOLD sit at a conference table. WEISS wears a cream Jovani 25773 long fit beaded sequin three-piece formal pant suit and beige Bur…

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Pretty much everyone has some experience of the old and dying. Some of you may be dealing with parents, grandparents, spouses, or other elderly loved ones who are making that final passage. Some of you may be making that passage yourself, perhaps without even knowing it.

Every fading life is unique but if you’ve seen more than a few of them you know there are also similarities among types. There are the old men, for example, who were accustomed to have things their own way all their lives, and worked hard to make it so, and who come into this grey zone expecting that, as when fortune and conditions went against them before, they will just work a little harder and thus keep their place in the world.

Unless they are more suddenly struck down, they are inevitably taught differently — by increasing infirmities, the fading of their senses, friends passing on or unable to communicate, and above all an uncanny imminence, if they are sensible to it, of a world beyond this one that they are moving toward whether their feet wish to take them there or not.

Sometimes you can see these old men having that reckoning: There may be fear at first, and unbelieving, but eventually many if not most of them make friends with that imminence and wait quietly for it for show them what it has to show. The calm these men obtain gives off a pale glow, and sometime even those of us who aren’t dying can see the imminence in it when we look at them.

Some old men who are accustomed to have things their own way, however, don’t experience the end like this.

They’re usually rich men, not prone to be sensitive or reflective or even aware of other people and things that have served them in the past. While other men may either curse their decline or accept it with humor or philosophical grace before passing on to their final acceptance, an old man of this sort will simply order and arrange whatever products or services make it seem as if it’s not happening: Machines, cutting-edge medtech, professionally invisible aides and servants, and, most important perhaps, the arrangement that everyone around him always acts as if there is nothing wrong — that he is still vital, still strong, still able to do great things with his mind and body that he is, to unbought observers, clearly unable to do

You and I, if we could afford this kind of simulacrum, might appreciate the comfort of it at first but never quite forget that it’s a pretense, even a fraud, and choose to do without it, except for the life-sustaining and painkilling parts, and even these we might relinquish at the very end.

This old man, however, does not see it that way. Because for him life has almost always been a simulacrum, a fantasy he has projected onto what you and I call the world — that vast landscape with its hills and valleys, floods and droughts and sorrows and beauties — which to him is just a sort of green screen for the projection that is his world. That world has nothing in it that would have discomfited the troubled child he was when he first gave himself over to it. It is full of comfort, luxury, crystal, gold, top-tier hookers, plush carpets, subservient retainers and slightly classier people with the skills and motivation necessary to play his friends.

Over time he forgets that there is anything else, even that there ever was anything else, and that he has just been incredibly lucky (if that’s the word) to be able to live completely in his own world. Whatever evidence of his decline can’t be masked, his mind easily ignores. When he looks in the mirror it’s always the light that’s at fault. If he can’t understand the question the questioner is stupid. He doesn’t see the doctors any more often than the suckers would if they had the money. Going to the doctors is great. He always feels swell when they finish with him, and they tell him how well he did on all the tests.

If he is indeed lucky, the flickering and guttering of his consciousness will dovetail with his fantasy and not disturb it or crack it so that reality can leak in. He forgets who these people smiling and praising him are because they were never so great in the first place. The world seems to fade because he is done with it. He sleeps more and more because he works around the clock, and if, as he slides into his nightly abyss, the thought intrudes that this time he might never wake up, there are all the monuments and proclamations and great achievements he has left behind to make even death seem like a beautiful thing, not a stranger or an adventure at all, just the greatest, the absolute greatest, the pinnacle of all his fantasies. If he never really lived, who’s to say he’ll ever really die?

No imminence, there; just a black hole, swallowed by the night.

Democrats have a real advantage going into the last months before the midterms — which may be why the Prestige Press is fanning controversy among the various Democratic factions that might damage their chances.

Funny, in the run-up to the previous Trump-time midterms in 2018, and in the run-up to the Biden-time midterms in 2022, I don’t recall much left-on-left controversy at all. Everyone seemed to understand the assignment (save democracy). I do recall our media pals trying to start some shit; in the former case, by lamenting how uncivil Democrats had become; in the latter, by wishcasting a “red wave.” But that’s just how they do; within the Blue camp, they didn’t get much assistance.

Yet now, five months from the midterms, we have an intra-party tsimmis over Graham Platner. To be fair, it’s not like the PP invented this — when the untested oysterman made his rapid rise in the Maine Senate race, borne aloft on waves of lefty enthusiasm (endorsements from Bernie and Elizabeth Warren!) and anti-gerontocratic opposition to politically palatable but 78-year-old Governor Janet Mills, it was almost inevitable that skeletons would from time to time tumble from the many uninspected corners of his closet.

Now, with a bizarre sexting scandal coming out weeks before the primary, it’s natural that people would worry that if he gets the nomination Republicans will have a whole battery of negative stories ready to run against him — maybe real, maybe not; after this mess, either kind might stick and sink him.

Well. Regular readers know I like Janet Mills, especially for punching back at Tubby and winning when so many institutionalist Democrats were showing their bellies. I saw the Platnerites calling her a liability (“Are Democrats About to Blow It in Maine?”) and just didn’t get it. In fact I thought Mills was the better choice and said so (”Maybe the way for Democrats to win is not to be young and vigorous, necessarily, but to fight as if they are”).

I wasn’t hot about it, though — I figured if Maine Democrats wanted Platner that bad (his primary poll leads were huge even before Mills withdrew), maybe they knew something I didn’t. And I must admit I was put further in sympathy with him by the opposition of that pious fraud David French, who did a whole don’t-become-your-enemy routine at the Times after Platner’s earlier scandals broke (“I’m seeing Democrats engage in the same process of absurd accommodation and justification that Republicans use to excuse their deep love for Trump” oh my God shut up nerd).

When Mills stepped back from the race, I figured that was that. But now with the sext thing the chatter is louder, and even though fink outlets like Axios are flogging it, it seems imprudent to ignore the controversy when there’s so much at stake.

I have two reactions to this: One practical, one moral.

The practical one is a wash. The fuckups Platner has been nailed for (so far) prove him a lunkhead but not a reprobate. The Nazi tattoo sounds like something a jarhead would do and not think about. His offensive Reddit comments, ditto. The sexting’s between him and the missus. He’s apologized and Maine Democrats seem cool with it. And if they’re not — and this is key, folks — they can always vote for somebody else on June 9.

On the moral question, I’m actually pretty outraged. But not at Platner.

I’m sitting here in the year of our Lord 2026 after ten years of Trump-infused politics. The sitting president is a felon, a con man, a tax cheat, and a rapist. His cabinet and other associates are all grifters and/or criminals of one kind or another. The whole party cheerfully enables immigrant kidnapping, concentration camps, the murder of protestors, and war crimes; it starves the poor, destroys public health, wrecks our infrastructure, and divides our allies.

And yet I am forced to listen to the likes of David French telling me how awful, how unforgivable, how disqualifying it would be for the Democrats to nominate this horrible man who has not stolen anything, nor been convicted of felonies, nor raped anyone, and is in polls still beating both his Democratic rivals and Susan Collins despite the controversies.

Chrissakes, I had to listen to Kellyanne goddamn Conway, Tubby’s original lie diffuser, compare Platner to David Duke and demand that my fellow Democrats and I “tell him to get off the ticket.”

And I’m supposed to worry that maybe this Democratic Senate front-runner isn’t a nice guy? Eat shit.

The Democrats have been playing Mother May I for decades while the Republicans rampage over every conceivable ethical and moral line. We just saw two of the grand old men of the grand old party, Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, suck up to Trump in the primaries and still get kicked in the balls because they weren’t sufficiently Trumplike (i.e., degenerate). Cornyn was beaten by the most comically corrupt politician in the Western Hemisphere. Nearly all other GOP candidates are crooks, psychos and/or morons.

But nobody’s crying O what does this say about the Republican Party? Surely the good Republicans will speak out!

It is well known that Democrats are held to a higher double standard. Well, here’s an idea — how about we start by not holding ourselves to it? The country is being flushed down the shitter by the worst people on earth. We don’t have time for patty-cake. Vote Platner — or don’t! Then vote in November, or be damned.

[The Oval Office. White House chyron with “TEXT ‘POTUS’ TO 45470 FOR UPDATES FROM THE WHITE HOUSE” at the bottom of the screen. A wider shot than usual; TRUMP is slumped and drooling at his desk at the back, while in chairs and sofas in front of him sit Cabinet members MARCO RUBIO, PETE HEGSETH, and ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. Foregrounded in the shot, appare…

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In my most recent alicublog post I mentioned the hilarious musical guest hiring for Trump’s White House Cage Match and how nearly all the nostalgia acts the promoters engaged (or claimed to have engaged) have pulled out. I mentioned also one of the crazier rightwing responses to it at The Federalist — one of the sites I used to scan a lot back when such fringe conservative propaganda vendors were more interesting, because that was where the Right really let its freak flags fly; now, of course, you can read similar lunacy in major media outlets and even among top Republican officials, including the President, who reacted to these cancellations with a deranged rant in which he promised “to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” (which, I remind you, had been proudly announced for the event only days before).

There’s all kinds of fun to be had with this. I like to imagine Tubby in his Jackie Gleason Miami Beach outfit from some of our Mar-a-Lago sketches, doing an endless monologue: “And how about that Tala-freako, huh folks. All transgendered up, he wants to trans you, we’re not gonna let that happen, we got that guy, real man’s man, Rex Paxton his name is. Or should be, it’s a good name for him, more x’s, makes him sound like a cowboy star, like Rex Rexson I think he was, Sexy Rexy, remember, ladies? This Paxton doesn’t have movie star looks, tell the truth, he looks like he ran face first into a big rock, but very manly, mmmuy mmmacho as they say in the prison camps...”

But if I may, I’d like to pull off the red nose and the bald cap and address this slightly more seriously. Because this event brings a sharp focus on conservative culture war, a topic I’ve been covering for years, and how it’s evolved since the Reagan years.

Charlie Pierce had an interesting piece up about American political satire, the better sort of which he associates with Twain and Mr. Dooley, and how the Right cooked up its own shitty, retrograde version during the Reagan era, spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh, “a national phenomenon for aggrieved white people across the nation” who “gloried in jibes against the poor, women, and various minorities.”

Pierce seems to think there hasn’t been significant response to this from satirists on the left. For obvious reasons I disagree. But I do notice that the basic grievance-based worldview expressed by Limbaugh — and all the little Limbaughs, intentionally funny or not, that came after — hasn’t changed much in the last 40-odd years: Now as then, they think non-white non-males (and any other people who consider them human) are the cause of all America’s troubles, and rather than argue against the political and social changes these people endorse they slur them with stereotypes and fantasies — the feminazi, the welfare queen, the limousine liberal etc — “othering” them so that honkies who may have forgotten their tribal loyalties may be scared back into the barn. The terminology may change but the blueprint never does.

Of course when non-conservatives get politically popular — or, as now, conservative malfeasance makes voters turn away from them toward the sorta-liberal Democrats — the othering goes into hyperdrive, as we have seen in the grotesque, parodic butch poses of Paxton supporters in Texas who seem to think their best hope to fend off the Democrat Talarico is basically to call him gay and/or trans (with the help of the typically clueless Prestige Press outlets like NPR, which describes this playground routine as a debate over “what it means to be a man”). This is too stupid to succeed (though it is Texas, so maybe I shouldn’t speak too soon). But it’s always the card they play.

This is generally what I mean when I talk about their culture war. There are many moving parts, but it’s all really based on this essential model: Trying to win with an ugly caricature of their opposition in the absence of anything actually helpful to or popular among voters. You folks want universal health care? Watch out, that Dumocrat likes them there transisexuals!

It’s only about culture in the broadest sense — that is, about what kind of world you want to live in, or can be scared out of wanting. That’s why they rant about 15-minute cities as a menace when no one wants to force it on them, and portray medical science breakthroughs that defend us from deadly diseases as an intolerable infringement by egghead know-it-alls on our right to be sick.

But when the conversation turns to the arts, something to which the word “culture” more properly applies, conservatives get extra weird. Because, while their target audience may be unfamiliar with the people and trends conservatives like to slander, and thus may be easily convinced to suspect them, everybody likes to see a show or hear some tunes.

And conservatives don’t know what to do about that, especially now that casual sexism, racism, and other retrograde attitudes are less prevalent in pop culture than once they were. That’s why they’re always yelling that fun stuff is woke — Star Wars, Andor, that Odyssey movie where for some perverse reason they let a black lady play the most beautiful woman in the world. Occasionally they try to grab a toehold on entertainment things that seem “conservative” to them — like that weird delusion they recently developed that only the Right had the capacity to appreciate Sydney Sweeney’s tits.

But it always comes off creepy and sad. You might convince some people at least that trans kids on sports teams or bike lanes or vaccination drives or no-fault divorce are attacks on their way of life; but when you tell them the same is true of the movies they watch and the songs they dance to and the stories they read, voluntarily and with pleasure, your chances of success are exceedingly low. It’s like telling them it’s un-American to eat ice cream or take a bath.

Trump has made it even weirder than usual by portraying the artists his own team had chosen to draw crowds to his bizarre Trump-and-America-birthday bash as “third rate” and offering to serve as the night’s entertainment in their place, a proposition unattractive to all but the most devoted MAGA heads.

In a way it’s similar to Trump’s professed loss of interest in the Kennedy Center, which his cat’s-paws had been mangling on his behalf, now that a court has told him to take his name off it, and his denunciation of popular entertainers like Bruce Springsteen. It strikes me as significant that MAGA stars like Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood et alia haven’t been rushed to the breach. Maybe it’s a deliberate signal that not only are artists who reject the Leader useless; all artists are unnecessary when you have the Leader to entertain you.

Maybe Tubby’s too far gone to realize it but this isn’t a good idea. It’s one thing to raise a ruckus about Ellen DeGeneres being gay or Murphy Brown being a single mom. It’s another to say, hey, the music and shows with which you while away your leisure hours are for losers — what you want to do is cheer your President as he makes the anniversary of our nation’s founding all about himself and maybe dances to “YMCA.” Especially with hamburger at eight dollars a pound.

They’re just gonna get weirder. You watch.

Something that’s even more bizarre than the fact that Trump is holding a UFC cage match on an octagon built on the White House grounds to “celebrate” the 250th anniversary of the United States (and his birthday) is that it’s not being treated as bizarre at all.

Oh, I’m sure it seems bizarre to you. I believe it seems bizarre to most people, and even to a lot of Trump voters, at least those whose brains have not been utterly cooked (such as this instagrammer who thinks it’s hypocritical to criticize this multi-million-dollar martial arts extravaganza because Biden had some drag queens to the White House once). Nobody could think it normal because it is obviously not normal, nor appropriate in any sense.

Yet the media works to normalize it. Some outlets marvel at the size of it — e.g. “Massive Scale of Trump’s White House Construction Revealed — Ballroom and UFC Arena Taking Shape” — as if it were the biggest butter cow at the State Fair. Some tell us Democrats are asking, I shit you not, how will you pay for that. (There’s the other side covered!) Others take the local angle (“Built in South-Central Pennsylvania, ‘The Claw’ arrives at White House ahead of UFC event”). Almost none go with AAAAGGH FOUNDERS SPINNING IN GRAVES as would be fitting

We know why Trump is doing it — or at least I do. Oh, why, yes, I’d be happy to tell you.

I know Tubby is a fan of gladiatorial sports (and that there’s kickbacks in it for him, though that would be true of any other “USA 250” scam), but his taste for those doesn’t explain this decision; I know he’s also a fan of capital punishment, for example, yet he doesn’t hold executions on the White House lawn. So we know he has some limits, and they don’t have anything to do with taste.

The cage match is an offense, but it’s a calculated offense — similar, in a weird way, to the assault he called down on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He did hope to wreck the Electoral Vote count and keep his dream of autogolpe alive that day, for sure. But he chose to do it stupidly and inefficiently with a bunch of rage-addled morons instead of with a team of trained assassins.

That conforms with his apparent feeling about the American establishment. He thinks our rule of laws and norms is too nice, too orderly, and too polite, and should be dirtied and bloodied up by cretins, yobs, and bullies responsive to his bellowed appeals who are his version of the yeoman farmers and artisans that other, fancier people consider the soul of the nation. That’s why he called in the mob instead of the A-Team. (Also maybe the A-Team would want the money up front.)

I think he also believes most Americans feel the same way. But in any case he definitely wants to put his own kind of crude smudge on the big anniversary. However, if his scumbags proposed that he station a masturbating chimp on the dome of the Capitol, or ride into the festivities on a haywagon while fucking a woman dressed as Elly Mae Clampett, he would find it offensive. He does not, in the final analysis, have the Caligulan brio for that. He just wants to show America to be his specific kind of dumb, violent place.

That’s freakish, but the kind of freakish we expect from him. What really gets me is that, apart for the usual liberal agony aunts, the media treats this like something only slightly eccentric, as if he wanted Tuvan throat singers to perform the National Anthem — just a wacky fashion choice like Melania’s Forest of the Damned Christmas decor, rather than an outrage, despite the fact that we can all see that it is.

My own old-fashioned idea of America has me hoping that this activates the silver lining of the Prestige Press having embarrassed itself and lost the trust of the people — that, apart from the total dummies (still as yet not a majority), Americans will understand intrinsically that just because the media plays along doesn’t mean they have to, and that this massacre of good taste will not capture their imagination and have them demanding bloodsport and, who knows, public executions as part of all future patriotic spectacles. I hate to think I’m wrong and that we have indeed become a nation of yeoman mobsters.

“I just don’t feel good,” my mother said. She’d been getting what she said were steroids from her doctor, a young Indian man in Bridgeport who took Medicare and may have been a geriatric medicine specialist or even a gerontologist; Mom said he knew how to treat old people but maybe she just meant he was polite and helpful. When she was getting the steroids Mom said they made her feel better than she had in years. “I’m gonna be running up the stairs to your apartment,” she said, referring to the fifth floor walkup I lived in, or maybe she we thinking of the other fifth floor walkup I lived in years earlier, the climb to which she laughed about, winded, and never came back to make again.

But then the doctor cut her off. He told her it was no longer safe for her to take them. I said, and looking back I feel bad about this (as I do for so many other things), that there had to be some reason he said it, maybe the way it interacted with some other drug or it was bad for her heart or something. She was not having it. “It was good for me,” she said. “I felt good. Now I don’t feel good, I just don’t feel good!”

When she said it I was sitting with her at her kitchen table, that little table was always covered with a clean plastic cloth with a floral pattern, on one of my infrequent visits in one of those last months before she had to give up the house and go live with my sister and her family. She moved carefully around the kitchen and touched or reached for objects as she went; at the table she was hunched and looked up at me when she talked.

She looked her age but from that angle she also looked like a little kid, a kid who had been through a lot, which she had. She always had this childishness in her, and it rose up from time to time. She even sounded like a little girl now, a bit whiny, as if she were talking about something small that would bother children like getting the wrong flavor of ice cream. This childishness was in her, I saw it, and it froze me, because the thing it called for me to do was gather her up like a child and take care of her. But I couldn’t, because to the day she died, though I was then quite a grown man, she was still the parent and I was the child.

A few years ago I had a big operation on my pancreas. The surgery drugs were very good — Dilaudid, particularly; I kept telling the ICU staff how great I felt despite my big operation and how grateful I was to them all. Back in my room I was weaned from Dilaudid onto less powerful drugs. Slowly I became aware that there was nothing for which to be grateful. I was not in terrible pain, but I was very uncomfortable and I struggled when the nurse asked me to rate my pain (partly because the remaining drugs made this kind of judgment difficult for me). “I don’t know,” I told her, crumpled and baffled. “I just don’t feel good.”

I am currently convalescing at home from major surgery to my knee. It is not so crucial a surgery as that earlier one — in fact it’s performed about fifty times as often, and the success rate is higher. But recovery is much more difficult, a fact I only came to understand after the operation, despite repeated attempts to educate me beforehand. I was careful about avoiding falls but tended to overdo the walking and after a week of what I thought was the start of an unusually rapid return to normal my knee swelled up like a ham and for a few days I was largely confined to bed.

I have gotten more mobile since but I tire easily and even get dizzy, especially as my blood pressure is depressed by the oxycodone, which also constipates me; at the toilet I push down hard on the floor with my good leg and grab the ribs of the radiator in front of me and pull, hoping to shake something loose (and it usually is). Getting the ice packs out of the freezer and taking them to the spare bedroom (where I am sleeping until I can stop waking up every two or three hours) and wrapping my dressing to protect it from condensation before I strap on the ice packs feels like heavy labor, but when I lie down I am restless. The leg gets heavy then tense then hard. At bedtime I strap devices to my shins that squeeze at intervals to discourage blood clots; the little blinking boxes groan like robots trying to get out of bed after a hard night. And in the morning so do I.

Shifting and tangling my covers, I think about my mother. Like her I feel that no one knows how bad I feel — at least in that special way that would get them to do something that really helped, the way kids think pain and suffering can be taken away by magic, or by a kiss where it hurts.

I don’t think my mother ever felt she got that; she certainly didn’t get it from me, at least not while she was alive. I regret not knowing it when it might have helped, but I have the comfort of knowing it now. I don’t have a lot of feeling for the dead. I don’t keep their pictures; I don’t go to their funerals or visit their graves. But I do consider it a blessing and a gift to learn, whenever I learn, what they knew.

[AARON SORKIN and JEFF BEZOS after the end of their CNBC interview last week, in which BEZOS called for zero taxes on a Queens nurse, said he paid a lot of taxes and it would do no good to tax him more, pimped AI etc. SORKIN is clearly in wrap-up mode.]

SORKIN: That went well!

[BEZOS nods, apparently distracted.]

I think we got the gist — don’t tax billio…

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I had the surgery. It was stressful and still hurts, but mostly in the expected manner. The prognosis is good.

Still, before superknee comes healingknee, a major drag and more importantly a slow drag. Life will be abnormal awhile. When the surgery team told me they’d see me in two weeks and then they might write me a back-to-work note, if appropriate, I thought, surely you jest — I bounced back from a pancreatectomy sooner than that!

I did not reckon (because, in my desperation for normalcy, I would not let myself reckon) on the effect of, reading from the record, an “intramedullary drill [used] to enter the distal femoral canal... carried out the distal femoral cut, sized the distal femur to the size listed above... then secured 2 drill holes for placement of the 4-in-1 cutting guide, secured that with 2 pins, and carried out the anterior, posterior, posterior chamfer, and anterior chamfer cuts respectively...”

Not to mention what happened when the surgical team “turned our attention to the tibia.” Nor the elevated soft tissue and skin flaps. Also I do not advise you look up “MCL pie crusting” if you expect ever to find yourself in my position.

I was asleep for all that, but now, over a week later, I still feel its effects. Also I recently overdid my exercise and was set back. The new pain is not terrible; what was terrible, a bit, was being stripped of that sweet childish feeling that I could always cheat a bit and win, like squeezing through concert crowds to the front of the stage. Not here and not now, I guess.

So please bear with the slow crawl back into position. I certainly missed you lovely people and your brilliant comments and crosstalk. Following the news last week without having a place to talk about it made me itchy, and hearing Tubby talk yet again about how the Iran Excursion was all but won was extra disorienting.

I mean how often do we get this…

…only to have it followed by a bunch of this:

I remember Kissinger saying Peace Is At Hand in Vietnam, well before the fact, and also other duplicitous diplomatic statements about our previous foreign wars of choice. (I understand this didn’t happen in WWII, which was more of a “blood, sweat, and tears” thing.) So give some credit to Trump, and to the Prestige Press that continually and credulously repeats his claims, for adhering to this norm, if not many others.

But Trump’s particular spin, as often, is to tell us not mainly about Peace but rather about Victory, which he claims for himself in grandiose terms; then the Iranians tell the world (the part of the world inclined to listen, that is, which for the most part does not include the U.S.) that he’s full of shit, and then Trump threatens to kill millions of people, and the cycle repeats.

This has happened several times in the course of this relatively short war. The Independent tallied 11 such pronouncements back on May 6, and since then people seem to have stopped counting or even paying attention.

But Trump’s Peace Is At Hand shtick differs from Kissinger’s, and others’, in three big ways: 1.) the apparent manipulation of betting markets by insiders for profits; 2.) his lurid braggadocio, which I assume he keeps up lest the headlines dwindle to “President says war won, again”; and 3.) the absolute predictability of the rinse-and-repeat cycle described above. In fact I don’t worry, as I write this on Sunday night, that my words will be mooted by a real Iran deal — not only because it’s unlikely but also because even if a deal were reached, we could count on Trump to fuck it up.

That’s inevitable because Trump’s goal isn’t peace or really any kind of resolution — it’s attention. Iran has been described as a distraction from the Epstein Files, but that doesn’t quite capture it. For one thing, it’s not as if people have forgotten the Epstein Files. In fact you’ve probably heard jokes about how the Epstein Files have turned out to be a distraction from Iran. But, really, each is a distraction from the other, just as his every stupid statement or social media post is a distraction from everything else.

The difference is most of his distractions are nothing but distractions. Is there any substance, for example, to an AI slop video of Trump tossing Stephen Colbert into a dumpster? The criminal conspiracy behind the Epstein Files, on the other hand, and the violence and disruption of the Iran War are meaningful events that are treated as distractions.

Because that’s all anything is for him: Everything from matters of life and death to memes is just another node in a network of attention-getting devices meant to keep everyone perpetually distracted.

If you wonder how that helps him when the price of everything keeps rising and everyone hates him, the answer is it doesn’t.

Those are real problems. He doesn’t have anything in his skill set that works on those.

That’s why an alarming percentage of people mistrust reports of assassination attempts against Trump. It’s not, as the thumbsuckers and headshakers suggest, that ours is a post-truth society. It’s that Trump himself has no relationship to the truth. People don’t wonder whether he plotted his own assassinations. They wonder what difference it would make if he did.

This leaves the country in a strange limbo. Trump could redirect some government money to voters or illegally suspend some of their taxes to win back their favor, but he’s so fond of stealing government money for himself and his stooges that he probably can’t bear to cut the rest of us in. (The public probably would see through it anyway and be ungrateful.)

Chances are we’ll skid into the midterms with many voters expecting him to rig them — though his regard for himself and contempt for his Republican vassals in Congress are both so outsized that he wouldn’t see the point. (Does anyone really expect a successful impeachment out of a Democratic wave election? He certainly doesn’t.)

This leaves Trump just there, not acknowledging the newly uncooperative Congress (just as he doesn’t acknowledge the current subservient one), continuing to violate civil liberties and the rule of law, pitch imbecilic excuses to the courts, and dish out distractions. In a world where other people and nations exist — that is, a world Trump doesn’t acknowledge and probably doesn’t think exists — this would probably be untenable. But if we imagined, back in January 2025, a situation like the one in which we now find ourselves, wouldn’t we have considered that untenable? Yet here we are.

As announced, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down will be closed a week while I recover from surgery. See you on the 25th!

As you may know, today I go under the knife. So we’re doing a super-simple, easy-mode Fun Friday before the hiatus week. Hope that’s OK.

The disarmingly dumb question is, despite being a dazzling urban sophisticate, what’s a fast-casual chain dish that you could eat the hell out of?

Some of our prejudices are based on status anxiety, malign social conditi…

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Heads up, guys: Starting Monday we’re doing what in the business is called a skip week. (Don’t worry, paid subscribers, you’re covered; we throw the meter until I return, and you still get your full month/year of service.)

The occasion is not a national holiday. I am having another damn operation. This one is not on my guts, though; it’s on my knee, soon to be my ex-knee. It’s TKR time!

Though not athletic, I have made good use of my legs over the years, especially in New York, where there are so many things to do and reasons to ambulate. I walked, I ran, I danced, I hopped turnstiles, stage-dove, all that. In recent years I’ve been more deskbound but until recently my mobility held up very well.

Alas, the piper has come to collect. Both my knees have been bone-on-bone for years. I get around, but the point of pain comes earlier; stairs are daunting, running injurious. I’m in a good space between too early and too late. It’s time, at least for one of them.

As carved up as I’ve been, it’s one thing to lose organs or pieces thereof and walk away clean, more or less; quite another to have to replace one of the body parts with which I was born with a piece of machinery.

I’m grateful that they can do this, mind. It’s great to live in this age of medical wonders and I feel bad for those who came before it and had to make do, and those down the road who will be denied proper treatment as we revert to barbarism and treat failing limbs and organs with homeopathy and tallow. Antibiotics and opioids rule.

But still: a prosthesis. I know it’s far from Otto Dix war casualty territory, and the effect of it probably won’t be too noticeable. Plus I do have an intraocular lens, two dental bridges, and a pin in my other knee. There’s already plenty to pick out of the tray when they burn me off.

Nonetheless I’m a little surprised at how the prospect is affecting me. I thought today of the scene at the end of Serpico, where he’s waiting with his dog for a ride to get out. Prior to that, just before the glimpse of the Knapp commission, we hear the doctor’s voice describing the effect of his injuries from his shooting: “In all probability, the hearing in your left ear won’t come back.... Your left side will feel stiff occasionally. Once in a great while you may experience some dizziness...” When I was a young and healthy kid watching that, it caught me up short; he didn’t just get shot and recover, I thought; he lost something, and it won’t come back. It fits the feeling of the movie’s end, especially with the reprise of that beautiful Mikis Theodorakis theme that hearkens back to distant and unrecoverable shores. Now I am there. Not a casualty of anything but long life. But still.

Take care, see you ‘round the bend.

[A drawing room like the one at Preston Manor, except through the window you can see a coastline in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Seated on an antique settee is CHARLES WAXWROTH, in his sixties, thin with wispy, tousled gray and blond hair, over a high forehead, face pale but for a pinkish cast to his cheeks, wearing a Turnbull & Asser green double-breast…

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©2012 Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license

I give grief to centrist Democrats and Prestige Press trimmers and God knows they deserve it, but I don’t say much about the guys I would call Resistance Cons — those onetime committed conservative pundits who were pole-axed by the Trump phenomenon and have wound up backing Democrats and more-or-…

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