CSotD: The Man Who Would Be King
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Might as well lead with the punchline: It looks as if our self-anointed monarch is going to have a major ketchup-flinging tantrum this Saturday, given the amount of publicity and encouragement being devoted to the next No Kings celebrations. Or protests. Or whathaveyou.
But, whatever they are, they look to be big. Possibly the granddaddy of them all.
There’s no reason, as war-torn Portland has proven, that you can’t protest and celebrate at the same time, and I think it’s important to do so for a couple of reasons.
One is that bullies can’t stand being laughed at, and if everyone takes a position of ridicule, the ketchup will really fly, but how can it be any worse? They’re already arresting seven-year-olds and citizens and they’ve charged a guy with not carrying his papers, which is exactly what the John Birch Society warned us was going to happen and so here’s this clip again:
A nice touch is the quick shot of witnesses, who will later turn out to include the young Bulgarian woman fleeing the Nazis but being extorted for sex in return for exit papers.
Note that Casablanca was intending to depict both Nazis and collaborators as very bad people, a message that seems to be getting lost these days.
Collaborators are everywhere, and most of them operate in true sincerity. They may be incorrect, but they’re not lying.
It’s important in today’s world to recognize that we are siloed enough that some people only see the apologists.
You don’t have to wrestle with your conscience if you aren’t getting both sides of the story, and Big Brother has done an excellent job of proving that 2+2=5 and that antifa is the name of an actual group, which is paying demonstrators to turn out and protest our government.
It’s hard to tell the deliberate liars from those who have been fooled by propaganda, but, as Dr. Johnson explained, that’s not important:
MURRAY. ‘It seems to me that we are not angry at a man for controverting an opinion which we believe and value; we rather pity him.’
JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir; to be sure when you wish a man to have that belief which you think is of infinite advantage, you wish well to him; but your primary consideration is your own quiet. If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.”
So, see you Saturday. And a hint: Keep your signage short and simple. Nobody’s going to stop to read a novel, no matter how well-written.
More than six words is a waste, and four is even better.
It is critical to distinguish between our great antifa leader and the current president. Roosevelt faced economic chaos and disaster, but said our greatest fear was panic, and that if we remained calm and focused and ready to work, things would straighten out.
Trump, by contrast, has purposefully stoked fear and driven a wedge between Americans, and not with any subtlety: He has openly declared Democrats the enemy and re-configured the Dept of Justice, firing those who decline to concoct dubious legal challenges of his opponents.
There’s no subtlety in this: He has specifically told his MAGA loyalists, “I am your vengeance,” making them part of his team, steeped in bitter disappointment for which they blame the “others.”
A half-century ago, such people stayed under rocks, until George Wallace rallied them for one more bite at the apple and Archie Bunker emerged as a Rorschach hero/villain inkblot, more mercurial than ironic.
Today, the government is shut down, people are worried, the markets are in crisis and Dear Leader is busily indicting attorneys general for having stood up to him in the past.
And whether you consider him a great salesman or a big con artist, you have to give him credit for turning the Pope and the carpenter he represents into villains. The very word “woke” sends Trump loyalists into a tizzy and they pray each Sunday for God to smite those guilty of being kind and fair and accepting of strangers.
Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, Bennett barely has to reach for the metaphor, because Dear Leader is taking bows for having (finally) stood up to Netanyahu and brought an end to the War in Gaza, while hoping nobody notices how he is strangling freedom in his own country.
Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, but you’ll note that two of these men quickly broke with the third as soon as the Axis had been defeated. Peace is lovely, but you can’t just spackle over major cracks in the foundation and expect things to hold, or make nice with people like Victor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while claiming to support freedom.
And for all the joy over the settlement, Jennings points out, it’s not as if the rest of the world has forgotten who was providing the materiel to keep the war going.
Nor have very many people forgotten that Gaza wasn’t the only place in the world with an ongoing war that could use some diplomacy, if anyone has standing to step between those combatants. Brookes seems to doubt that Trump is in any position to pull a second dove out of his hat.
While Kal echoes the Faulkner character who said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Which seems more applicable to the Middle East than Dear Leader’s historic summary, “So this long and difficult war has now ended. You know, some people say 3,000 years, some people say 500 years. Whatever it is, it’s the granddaddy of them all,” which I think makes it Moses’s fault, but certainly not Allenby’s.
However, when they build the Trump Memorial on the space where the Washington Monument once stood, that’s what I want carved on the base: “Whatever it is, it’s the granddaddy of them all.”
By then, we’ll have changed the National Anthem:
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