by bill | Jul 24, 2025 | Bread and circuses |
Back in the day when I used to go to baseball games, they had something called “dot racing.” (Maybe they still do? I haven’t been to a baseball game in a long time.) It was… well… two dots, racing. One would run ahead, then the other would catch it and take the lead, and it would go back and forth like that. (It would always be close in the end, and whichever dot you were rooting for would inevitably lose.)
The last six months have been like that. I call one dot “Evil” and the other one “Stupid,” and the question always is, which one is winning today? I always root for Stupid, which at least has the virtue of being entertaining.
Yesterday Stupid was definitely ahead. There was a clip going around of That Fucking Guy bragging that he was going to lower drug prices “1000%,” or maybe “1,100, 1,200, 1,300, 1,400.” Now, as any reasonably bright 5th grader could tell you, that’s not how percentages work. If you take away 100% of something, it’s gone; zeroed out; finito. Anything more than that is meaningless. (It doesn’t go into the negative, as some of the jokes seemed to suggest. But that’s nitpicking innit.)
I mean, this is just the latest of a million nutty things that have come out his mouth. But it strikes me as symbolic, as the thing he claims he is going to do is not just impossible, but not even coherent. It makes me ask myself, again for the millionth time, how has this idiot gotten himself in a position to wield such enormous power and to make people like me pull our hair out on a daily basis?
Then it hit me: He’s Wile E. Coyote. He runs off the cliff onto thin air, but unlike WEC, he’s too dumb to understand how gravity works, so he never plummets.
But can it last forever? Lately the light seems to dawning in his eyes; is what my friend calls the “MAGA-Epstein Vortex” going to be his Isaac Newton moment? I’m not holding my breath, but I’m watching.
by bill | Jul 8, 2025 | Bread and circuses |
Recently I came across a post from October 2016 where I wrote this:
This week I diagnosed myself with a condition that I’m calling TAD, or [redacted] Addiction Disorder. The symptoms are that anytime you access any form of media, the first, second, and third things you want to know about are what kind of crazy shit [redacted] has done now. Or the moment you get into any conversation that’s even vaguely political, you want to steer it toward [redacted] in order to wallow in his nuttiness.
Getting the Republican nomination for president has given him a platform from which to push back the frontiers of assholishness, to scale previously unthought-of heights of douchebaggery, and he has not fumbled the opportunity. With every day that passes he achieves new personal bests, and thus new world records. He is the Katie Ledecky of angry orange gasbags, the Muhammad Ali of political asininity.
I’m a little worried about the withdrawal, which seems certain to begin November 8.
Oh, the innocence! We were so confident that he could never, ever become president. Almost nine years later, my TAD is stronger than ever. It is just impossible to believe what we are seeing transpire on a daily basis, it’s the eternal slow-motion car crash that you just can’t look away from, nor can you stand to look at it for very long. Only now it comes with intimations of fascism, like yesterday when the U.S. military rolled through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles for no good reason other than to be seen doing it.
(more…) by bill | Jul 7, 2025 | Read it in books |
Books Acquired:
Other People, Martin Amis
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
The Science of the Dogon, Laird Scranton
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
Books Offloaded:
His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
Progress Made:
The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, Kyle Arnold
Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick
And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields
Messages from a Lost World, Stefan Zweig
Books Finished:
Success, Martin Amis
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut
What you did in Rosewater County was far from insane. It was quite possibly the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use?
In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, foods, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So — if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out.
—Kilgore Trout
I always try to get this thing written by the 5th of the month, not that anyone’s waiting with bated breath, but you need deadlines in life. This time, though, I accidentally left the backpack with my computer in it at home over the 4th of July weekend. I had been gearing up for a stemwinder Independence Day rant about the fucked-up state of this country today, which would have accomplished nothing but raising my blood pressure. So maybe it’s just as well. You don’t need me to tell you how bad it is: Internment camps and indentured servitude are back, and genocide and slavery may not be far behind.
Anyway.
I feel a little sheepish claiming Cat’s Cradle, as this was my sixth (?) time through it, and it is pure pleasure anyway. Mr. Rosewater, on the other hand, was a bit of a slog. I’ve read it several times too, and somehow keep thinking I’ll like it better next time. It’s funny, these are two consecutive books by the same author, both are deeply cynical satires, but one is a joy and the other a drag. I mean, Rosewater has its moments — it’s Vonnegut after all — but something has curdled in it; the bleak portrait of humanity feels genuine, the calls for compassion and happy ending seem forced.
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