"Donald Trump is the President? (II)."

Every so often I'm abstracted, sifting through the clouds, reading bad old numbers of Punisher War Zone by Chuck Dixon, rooting through the garbage for something to eat, watching back to back documentaries about the Manson Family or episodes of Real Housewives of Atlanta, and I'll think –– "What am I doing?" And I also forget momentarily that Donald Trump is the President.

Today I was washing up and reevaluating reality for the thousandth time this year. And I thought, "We take it as a given held self-evident that all those hicks and sourmash addled hayseeds in the Red Zones voted for Trump, but why would a bunch of Kentucky miners vote for a swaggering flabby privileged incompetent New York ( uh –– Queens County ––) rich kid businessman?

(Never mind calling a seventy-year-old man a "kid" –– he still has the natural bearing of a tubby school bully. He is indeed the locus classicus of the ubiquitous type.)

Who can credit the people people vote for?

I remember somebody saying a similar thing once many years ago in a book warehouse in Oval. "Who can explain the people people fall for, especially on the rebound?"

I was watching CNN idly last night and there was a piece about the kerfuffle in Peru. They showed the former Peruvian President, who had been arrested and charged with corruption, now in hospital. He was patently Japanese. Even his name was Japanese.

He has been pardoned by the current President of Peru. Camera cut to a shot of the current President, a white man with a bright red face. His surname is Kuczynski.

A good Peruvian name.

Peruvians seem to prefer to vote for people who are as unlike them as possible to rule over them.

Et cetera
Et cetera

"Trump Versus Tillerson Haircut Competition."

Trump versus Tillerson in a competition over which weirdo's hairdo looks more like a thin cobweb was draped across their shining bald pates.

Whose [sic] gonna win.

Ever walked through a cobweb in the early hours of the morning and looked at yourself in the mirror and you didn't know if you were Trump or Tillerson?

"I felt so lousy I didn't know if I was Trump Tillerson ot a ten tonne turd!"

Trump resents Tillerson because when they stand next to each other neither man looks exactly hirsute.

Tillerson resents Trump for bringing the very idea of hair into disrepute.

Tillerson resents Trump for bringing the very reality of hair into doubt.

Trump resents Tillerson because his hair lacks conviction. It lacks "gumption".

Trump resents Tillerson because he will not partake of the sunbed treatment that gives his hair its signature urine colour.

Think of the strange arachnids that wove the gossamer that was then deposited unceremoniously on these two politicians' heads and then crafted –– by cynical men –– into hollow pompadours.

Think of the number of tunnel spiders required to coat Donald Trump's head each night.

Who would win in a headbutt smackdown between Trump and Tillerson? Neither one –– they'd both be knocked unconscious by the sheer lack of cushioning afforded by their thin layers of hair.

These guys should be outiftted with compulsory cycling helmets to protest their heads, because those illusions of hair they have on now ain't going to cut it in a smackdown or a pile up.

Are these magical Icelandic chefs being paid exorbitant amounts to maintain a thin film of moss on Donald Trump's head?

Are the premiere video installation artists of New York's famed "Soho" zone being paid to craft holograms on top of Tillerson's bald bonce?

_________________________________

I was watching Don Lemon. Don had been trying once again to make the case that Trump is "shithouse batshit crazy". He seemed to hope that if he could say the words in the right order the whole country would finally realise tbis simple golden truth.

Heck, I believe it. But I'm not a shitkicker out of old Kaintuck. My vote doesn't count.

The Matt Lauer story had broken and nobody knew who was going to turn out to be a sex pest monster next. Correspondent Angela, a woman of colour, was complaining about how even on this show she had been interrupted mid-sentence by men and such unchivalrous behaviour had surely had its day. Don and the fat white Trump proxy both nodded soberly and clucked sympathetically.

Five minutes later she couldn't get a word in edgeways as Don and the fat Republican were yelling hoarsely at each other again. Angela was on the video screen but Don had his hand up to stop her from speaking while he bellowed at his adversary.

"Don Lemon gets really angry," I said pensively.

"I think one day he's going to just stop and say, 'That's it, I've had enough, I can't take it anymore'" said my wife.

"You know, Wash Cowie thinks Don Lemon is dumb," I said to my wife, wondering for the first time if Wash Cowie has a point.

Charlie Rose is gone and Don Lemon ain't doing so well.

"George Rastapopoulos."

Great day today. Bad day for Trump is a good day for me and I'll take whatever I can get boy yup.

People were raving with pleasure on CNN. They finally got to say: "No nothingburger, there's a there there."

People struggled with Papadopoulos's name. Wolf Blitzer came right out and called him "George Stephanopoulos." I laughed –– Wolf didn't.

I'm surprised he didn't spazz utterly and blame Tintin's arch enemy, Bob Rastapopoulos.

I said to my wife, "There's never been a precedent for Bob Mueller. Except Superman. He's like Superman. No he's Batman because he has no actual super powers. Half the country –– no half the world –– at least –– is counting on him. And we know nothing about him –– we never see him. He's like The Shadow. There hasn't been an enigmatic folk hero like this in hundreds of years."

Jeffrey Toobin was on every show, giddy with unabashed hope for the first time in months –– years.

On a personal note I was pleased because crusty Richard Quest was bumped so they could show Wolf Blitzer. I first became aware of Richard Quest the night of the Brexit. I was in LA watching CNN and the vote count coming in. I phoned up my mum and said, "Your team won."

English CNN is very strange. It's always talking about the markets in Dubai and Africa. It's always talking about ladies' golf.

"Nothing to Say About Nothing to Say (A Slight Slap At Mobocratic Snobbery)."

Or, "Cockney Ding Dong Don with the Former Clapper."

Don Lemon had Former Director Clapper on last night.
Clapper looks about how I feel.
Don goes, "Director Sir, whatcha got adzackly."
"Nothing," says Clapper. "I got nothing Don. I've officially run out of things to say about Trump."

Meanwhile there was a little sidebar box with a radar shot of the latest Hurricane ("Maria"). I thought it said "Hurricane Mania." It'd be an apt phrase –– everyone's gone hurricane mad!

Too much Hurricane Mania, certainly.
"Too botheration" as Doc Alimantado used to say.

Later on, I was upstairs, and heard the CNN man refer to Hurricane Irma.
I heard it as "Hurricane Enema".

I wish these hurricanes would stop. For the good of the people, of course, but also: What with all these hullaballoos the would-be Prez seems to have got scot-free out of "shtook" again, all on the back of this Hurricane Mania.

The fat shining bright orange nothingburger has sallied out astride the gusts,  like Aeolus, the god of winds, or Storm of the X-Men, that wind–rider, all the way to freedom and redemption. I know he's a black-belt master of expelling hot fetid air, it's been documented extensively –– wonder if the whole "Hurricane Mania" is another Trump 4-D chessmaster conspiracy!

Maybe he's got Russian planes seeding the clouds and nobody knows.

I DON'T KNOW.

"Punisher T-Shirt at Trump Rally." Or, "Sympathy For the Punisher."

Did you see the rogue's gallery of hicks and KKK rejects at the rally? The Legion of Substitute Villains?, behind Trump at his rabble-rousing last night in West Viriginny? Did you see the late Kim Fowley in there –– his celebrated corpse –– or was that Yellowman in a curly black wig.

I saw a guy in a Punisher t-shirt there too, cheering for them to bring back the hangman, the gas chamber and the ducking stool, and for that hangman to be named Robert Eugene Lee, for he rideth on a pale horse with a scimitar between his teeth. Chuck Dixon, was that yeou?

It's a shame about Chuck Dixon, because I like a few (I originally wrote "a lot" but went back flushed with the spirit of accuracy and changed it) of his comics and I actually agree with him to an extent about the late instinctive reimagining of every superhero as a so-called "minority". Not because I'm a virulent racist, sexist, homophobe &c. but because they do it so poorly and blunder so badly at the cost of the fine art of penmanship. Most of those reboots suck.

And I thought, "Poor Punisher."

And I thought,
"Poor Frank Castle.
Guy's misunderstood.
He's not a Trump Republican.
He is a mass-murderer,
he is a serial killer,
but he is not a Trump Republican."

"Tautologies for Kentucky."

                       

When Trump breaks off mid-sentence in a speech to say "a lot of people don't know that," what he means is "I didn't know that."

Another thing he says, written as a formula:

"X, and it certainly is X."

95% of what Trump says is variously empty flummery, bland fudge and vacuous flannel. 

Last year's funnel cake.

Flannel cake. Have you ever had flannel cake? At Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard?

His hair is like what he says –– a lot of  hot flatus with very little integrity or solidity.

A grotesque oddity. A quiddity.

A spider's cobweb with nothing in it ––

      Lucy Locket lost her pocket,

      Kitty Fisher found it.

      Nothing in it, nothing in it

      But the binding round it.

      Donald Trump lost his periwig
      Steve Bannon found it
      Nothing in it, nothing in it
      Nothing whatsoever in it. 

Even when he is talking about North Korea Overcomber says something like, "We shall see what we shall see and then we shall do what we shall do." Always deferring saying anything. Tautologies for the Kentucky shitkickers.  Thank goodness for his acid-trip fuck-head tweets –– that's the only time he says anything, even if it is strictly the cream from the nutfarm. 

That guy's hair is like a wedding cake from the eighteen seventies lovingly preserved in formaldehyde. It tastes awful. Also––

I AM OUT OF AMMO.

"Trump, The Greenpoint Years."

I was recently watching the famous (but not famous enough apparently) "Small Loan of a Million Dollars" interview clip with OVERCOMBER DUMB. Aside from the obvious scene of chronic "tone deafness" that apparently didn't dissuade those dirt-poor bucktooths from Kaintuck back in Octember, there was another detail of particular interest to me.

In his oral testimony of his hard knock life, his sad plaint, Trump doesn't seem sure if he's from Brooklyn or Queens. Maybe, methought, he's from Greenpoint, that strange "liminal threshold" at the North-Western corner of Booklyn [sic] & just shy of the South-Western corner of Queens. I lived there for a hundred years one decade recently.

Still that said I am sure I never saw OVERCOMBER DUMB on the nightly trek back from the 7 at Vernon Boulevard–Jackson Avenue to Greenpoint & the McGuinness Boulevard over the Pulaski Bridge c. 2010–2014.

It was maybe 2010 I started to take that route out of sheer disgust at the other option: the L to the 62.

Forget Bedford man. Bedford's almost as bad as Trump.

I had started walking from the Bedford subway, via backroads, because I was sick of waiting for the 62 with the condo hipster rabble, people younger and richer than me, but then they built pretentious boutique bespoke hotels even in the backstreets, and I couldn't avoid oblivious uncool Manhattanites and bumbling Eurotrash and hipsters out with their parents and grandparents taking up the whole sidewalk rather than walking in a line.

Now I preferred to take the Pulaski Bridge with its working stiff demographic and that funny little man who flouted the rules by riding with great and inapt seriousness on a miniature motorcycle dressed as a cross between a traffic cop and Lee Perry.

I never saw the president there, and I think I'd have noticed if I had because in those years I used to semi-avidly watch The Celebrity Apprentice.

Who'd have guessed––

Guy's a fucking liar.
Guy's got a diamond-shaped mouth and a triangle in the centre of his face clustered around a smushed  patent fat kid nose.

* * * * * * * * * *

I laugh aloud with horrible tears in my eyes whenever Trump takes up the cause of "civilization" with himself quite absurdly as its prime defender. O for a Mencken today! Now he speaks loftily about "Western Civilization" –– like Allan Bloom –– and how it must be upheld at any cost. What civilization does he mean, I wonder, mock–innocently. The wrestling? Reality teevee? Billy Bush and Howard Stern? Sheesh.

Guy's a fucking postmodernist.

"He's Got Donald Trump Eyes." / "Rheumy." / Trump Is a Whiphid."

Trump's eyes. The area directly under them. The part that is accentuated because it is white. He puts the goggles over them on the sunbed so they stand out against the bad rotten orangeness of the rest. So they are bright white and they are in addition puffed up to the point of squeezing his eyeballs inward, all the way inside his eye sockets, if we can speak of Donald Trump having eye sockets per se with any degree of confidence. They are inflated with stagnant water. They're waterlogged.

"Trump's rheumy eyes."

I typed it into the search engine. I thought, "Have the prognosticators and wits and satirists and the commentators on Capitol Hill commented on Trump's eyes and specifically their rheuminess? Has Jim Acosta shrieked about it across the room for the audio track? 'TRUMP'S GOT RHEUMY EYES, SEAN!' No, they haven't. I ought to copyright it."

Incidentally I ought to have copyrighted the "Comey is My Homey," t-shirt, which I thought of [said with an admixture of incredible naivety and remarkable vanity] before anyone else. Way back in Los Feliz. I thought, "I had this thought and it'll go viral it'll make millions if handled deftly but fuggit I haven't the time or inclination to act today." Now all I have is the copyright on the "Trump Has Rheumy Eyes" meme. It isn't going to get me out of the ghetto I'm in.

Trump with his rheumy eyes, to get back to my subject, looks like J'Quille from Jabba's Palace in Return of the Jedi. You know the guy:

He's a member of the "Whiphid" alien race, according to the Wookiepedia. "Race" or "species"? Is it a "phylum" or a "kingdom". Fuggit who cares. Now we have a word for what Trump is.

I used to say Trump was a Skrull. 

Now I know better. Wrong universe. Guy's a Whiphid.

Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the very maniacal
                             American president
The eyes of the Whiphid spy / assassin.

"The Trump White House."

"How Quickly They Forgot –– Old What's His Name."

In my last blog, in my "comprehensive" list of CNN celebrities and White House hacks that none of my English auditors had ever heard of, even I forgot to mention that lost (or perhaps hiding) man, Reince "Prince Penis" Priebus.

How could I have forgotten such a colorful character who is never far from the eye of the hurricane, the centre of the action? 

Reince Priebus's own wife don't quite know who he is. He comes home and lets himself in the house, walks over to the dining room where they're already eating.  He says, "What, you couldn't wait for me?"

His whole family turns to him and says, "Who are you?"

He ain't Bannon.

He ain't Kushner.

He ain't Flynn.

He ain't Spicer.

He ain't Kellyanne.

He ain't even Jeffrey Lord.

He's...

... Who is he again...

There's an article in Vanity Fair calling Rex Tillerson the "Forgotten Man" but that's only because what's–his–name –– Reince –– is so forgettable and ineffectual that the author on the piece about Rex Tillerson being the Forgotten man has actually forgotten about the very existence of –– uh –– Priebus. 

"Horrible Hybrid Creature of Myth and, Uh, Legend."

"I am here." –– Artemus Ward.

I am now in England. Wife and I left LA, we moved back, and we don't have CNN, in fact we don't have a TV and we don't have the Internet and we don't have a landline and we don't have a sofa and we don't even have a bed, we're sleeping on a mattress on the floor inside the empty bedframe and by the way we don't have a kitchen table.

What we have is a cottage crammed full of boxes of books.

I have become so frazzled that I have started referring to books as "boxes" and vice-versa. As if they're the same. I've even dreamt about packing and unpacking boxes.

Last night I dreamt my wife got caught shoplifting from Old Navy.

In those last days in LA, while the Mexican movers were emptying our apartment, we had the TV tuned to CNN all the time, now half-watching, now rapt, now not,  and"Big Jim" Comey was then the hot topic. (Who is there now for me to share a joke with?)  In those days with the movers agreeing with us that this man Trump was peeling off badly awry and the world was gone cockeyed.

When we got to England I was garbling to everybody with great feeling through babbling lips about "Big Jim," "Bob" Meuller, that damn Bannon, Jeffrey Toobin, bad godawful Jeffrey Lord, excellent Don Lemon, Kushner that chinless fortunate son, shining Buddha mind Jim Ocasta and the beautiful quite exquisite Michelle Kosinski. Nobody in England knew what in durnation I was talking about exactly and conversely I didn't know who Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn were. I'm still not quite sure.

Absent CNN I am not up-to-date on the daily hourly vital battle against OVERCOMBER DON  –– I am also in the dark about the Real Housewives of New York –– and all I get is occasional updates garbled from my wife' –– who can trust that lousy shoplifter –– or from visits to the hotel bar down the street to use their wi-fi. I buy a two pound cup of tea for the privilege, but when I've drunk one cup I go up and quite brazenly ask for another cup of hot water and wring more tea out of the same exhausted teabag.

Like Joe Gould, who wrought tomato soup from ketchup sachets in Greenwich Village.

Today our genial waiter-cum-bartender asked me, "Had a relaxing day so far?"
I hemmed and hawed, considered returning the smalltalk, but preferred to consider the question literally. I remarked, "I don't think I've had a relaxing day in my life."

Then I sat down and watched the Amoeba website with great avidity. It was the Melvins discussing "What's In My Bag".

Who says I have lost my edge.
Who says I have lost my way.

All this is prologue to the following incisive political commentary:

Pathetically scouring the "statistics" page of Blogger I reread one of my old titles from this site, apparently my most popular article, yet nevertheless I misread it. I thought that "Bannon" said "Barron." That "gave me pause".

BANNON
BARRON

Gruesome mirror image.
Sinister doubling motif.
Imagine for a moment if one day Barron Trump married Steve Bannon. He'd become Barron Bannon.

Barron Bannon!

What more creepy hybrid hippogriff, the warped brainchild of Scylla and Charybdis both!,  from the thwarted blasted destroyed diseased mind of a bona fide madman, can be imagined?

Barron Bannon!

("Bruce Banner".)

("Bruce Banner is the Hulk. Barron Bannon is something quite else.")

[Another question: is this what passes for political satire in this neck of the woods?]

"That Is So True."

Is Overcomber Don aware how it looks when he extemporizes with the ejaculation "That is so true" in the middle of his prepared speeches?

"These words I am saying, I actually think this part is true. Most of what I say I don't know or care whether it is true or not. These words are not from me they are from some hack in my staff. But he wrote a true thing when he said that the Turkish nation fights with great bravery."

When the Turkish President talks in his native language, the empty crinkly smirk on Trump's face.

Then the boredom, tapping his fingers impatiently on the lectern.

Now Trump's impersonation of his excellent son, BARRON.

Now Trump staring in boredom at the ceiling in the corner of the Roosevelt Room.

Trump looking around and nodding randomly –– as if he speaks Turkish and thinks, "That is so true."

Now a leer. Now a broad grin and a nod to somebody in the audience. Now bored and waving his head from side to side. "Wonder what Barron's doing now."

                                      "I'd better nod again now."

We were at CarMax in Burbank yesterday in the waiting room and CNN was on. Trump said something about the justice services representing a line "between civilization and chaos" and I laughed out loud. Then I gulped, noting that there were other people in the waiting room, unknown quantities to me, possible "bad actors," and I tempered my laughter. I was watching particularly closely the overweight man in the khaki ballcap –– a classic Trump voter look.

Weirdly, in the next line Trump said something about a policeman killed in the line of duty. I made sure that I had a face of appropriate gravity and moral rectitude at this tragic news factoid, but then Khaki Ballcap, the Trump voter in the room, laughed hysterically. I was perplexed. Sean Spicer came on and was saying that there was no need for a special investigator into the Russian collusion controversy. Khaki Ballcap started shouting at the TV his support for this remark and I became uncomfortable. Then we were called through into the main room and that was that.

Apparently the CarMax in Burbank is the largest in the entire country!

What's On Russian TV?"

"General" Flynn it was revealed had appeared on Russian TV with Putin. The state-sponsored morning show.

This was seen as shocking and dodgy. He was paid for it, didn't declare this to his superiors.

This was the political side of it. My thoughts went elsewhere. Russian TV must be strange. Imagine the Russian people sitting on their uncomfortable dun-coloured couches dully flipping, no unable to flip channels because there is only one channel on TV, the Putin channel.

[In my patented bad Russian accent:] "Oh cool! Look, Vlodvadina! Come quickly! There's an American general on TV!!"

Russian TV sounds almost as odd as French TV.

"Frankly, Literally."

President Mutt: "I am not a crook."

I was reading Rollins's column in LA Weekly. Henry calls Overcomber Don "Comrade Trump" –– keeps plugging away at that name just like I keep calling him Overcomber Don. I think my name is better. Rollins reckons Overcomber's on the ropes. Dunno if it's so. Wish it were, dunno if it is. Every night CNN seems like they have THE PRES checkmated in their pincer move, and next day it's like all the infamies and blatant mendacities have been quietly reset and forgiven by the heavenly host. The Press Secretaries shriek at the journalists with green and black bile, White House and Fox News tells us it's all gravy for the coalminers, everything's great. Dunno who to blame –– the Republicans "up on Capitol Hill" or the red state meth-lab meatheads down to Old Kaintuck. I think I'll blame them all.

Anyway Rollins can rant and wheeze "like an asthmatic county fair town crier" (–– Michael Azzerad) about Trump, but I remember before the election pretty well he was of the crowd that said "I shan't vote. Clinton or Trump it's all the same, bruh." Morrissey was another although thank gosh he don't have a vote. I guess they had never watched The Celebrity Fucking Apprentice.

There is an awful epidemic in Washington that I have drawn attention to in a previous missive, possibly one of those missives that rated two hits from the "readership" so I'll repeat it –– since it is repeated daily, and with shocking frequency.

Everybody is saying "frankly" in their sentences now. It has started. Linguists, note my early remarks on the subject. Years ago I pointed out that everybody had begun to say "Look" to preface anything they wanted to say, after Obama did it. That still happens. Now "frankly" is the new "literally". Both words are strictly redundant in this context. We expect our politicians to speak "frankly" (or rather –– we did) just as we expect people to speak "literally" unless they actually say "figuratively speaking".  It's another dumb thing people to do to mark time while they gather their jumbled thoughts.

It's like they said "I am not lying when I say this one." But when people say that, of course, they are probably lying.

How can you tell when the President is lying?
It's easy –– his lips move.

* * * * * * * * * *

Jeffrey Toobin outdid Rollins the other night in the "hoarse bellringer from Hell" stakes. He was speaking directly into the camera projecting his thoughts into the minds of the viewers with great enthusiasm. I almost expected him to put on a mystical turban with a ruby in its centre and acquire a greenish glow. "PRESIDENT'S A FRAUD. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET. " Anyway in the midst of one of his (righteous, correct) tirades Erin Burnett started coughing and wheezing and she just couldn't stop. It was funny, she couldn't speak for about two minutes without coughing. It was like the situation, the President's firing of Big Jim Comey, had simply drained her lungs and their intricate alveoli.

Toobin was in the CNN studio with her, across the desk from her, while she was coughing. Then the hour finished and the show shifted to Anderson Cooper 360, and as is the fashion Anderson used some of the same pundits as Erin had had on. Like when Presidents keep on administrators from a previous presidency. Like say Trump did with Big Jim –– until he didn't.

Some of these pundits do twenty hour stretches. They are passed roughly from one compere to the next like cheap hookers at a rugby club dinner. Jeffrey Lord can go it for ever, saying the oddest things in defence of OV

ERCOMBER, but he must stop at some point and take the three hour limo trip from New York back to his centenarian mother in Maryland before Don Lemon's show begins. "Too late for mother," says Jeffrey.

Anyway, Anderson Cooper was talking to his various guests on sundry screens, and when he got to Jeffrey Toobin, that good worthy man (who was in another CNN studio and so on a remote feed) began a revised "THIS IS NOT NORMAL" address to the nation. He was like Walt Whitman, tinkering with Leaves of Grass over decades and through successive prints, refining it each time. But this time Toobin was interrupted all the while by the sound of coughing. He was obviously still sitting at Erin Burnett's desk in another CNN studio, and Erin Burnett was obviously still there hacking up a storm. I thought, "Why don't they take off her microphone now and give her a lozenge?"

"Bobby Charlton Was On Anderson Cooper."

Drumpk went off on a tear, all red-faced and in a mega-confused tizzy, calling Kim Jong Un "a tow-headed tearaway with a whole lot of spunk," then praising Andrew Jackson for his expert handling of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Everyone was outraged on CNN and the next day it was like they had forgotten all about it and were talking about new Drump doings. On the stroke of midnight the slate is all wiped clean.

That's how OVERCOMBER works –– he piles on the infamies so thick & fast you can't keep track of them all and you throw your hands up and give up and say fuck it you know what I'm going to vote for him and then commit suicide.

I was in Goodwill on Hollywood Boulevard and somebody had got rid of their Nixon ana collection. I bought three volumes of a vintage magazine just ennumerating Nixon's disgraces, all listed and illustrated. Somebody should do this with the Overcomber Don John.

MATTERS AT HAND

1. Drumpk at the lectern when somebody else is talking is a classic thing –– he just don't know where to look. His son BARREN has better self-control and focus than the father. It is well said that verily the egg don't fall far from the mothership.

2. Mike "Pfennig" Pence was saying that Drumpk is "literally each and every day frankly fighting the gale force wind of the establishment here in Washington." Firstly, why the "literally" and "frankly". Unnecessary fluff to cover up a hollow vapid core: THE BRAIN OF PENCE. But everybody is saying "frankly" this season, as I noted before so so what. Secondly, Trump is the FUCKING PRESIDENT. If he ain't the "Establishment" pray who is? Do "John" Trump and "Couldn't Give A" Pfennig still like to pretend they're alternatives, punk radicals playing in a noise band on the outskirts of town? G.G. Allin and Bloody F. Mess?

"The Oval Office."

3. Speaking of recent cliches "on the Hill," here are some that have really been doing the rounds:

"There is no there there." (Al Franken said to Big Jim Comey yesterday that "There is a there there.")

"Strongmen" –– Putin, the Filipino nutter and Kim Jong Un are all apparently "strongmen" and this is a technical term in frequent usage. Since when? I found it in a New York Times article and then everybody on CNN wanted to say it.
"Trump likes strongmen."
"Yes, but his preference is for clowns."

"Disrupt" –– when I wrote my PhD everybody loved to speak of "subversion" and "transgression" and now they vaunt "disruption" but really it's all the same fucking thing, innit? Ivanka talks about "disrupting" things in her new book. Time to stop disrupting right now methinks. What's the opposite of disrupting? Like Pete Seeger says, "ORGANIZE!"

4. I was watching the CNN pundits. They come and they go in rapid rotation. It's dizzying. They do the circuits. Jeffrey Lord must get home to his centenarian mother in the Chesapeake Bay so he doesn't do Don Lemon. But I was shocked and stunned when I saw SIR BOBBY CHARLTON the Manchester United and England veteran serving as a pundit on Anderson Cooper.

It was shocking because I had no idea Bobby Charlton was an expert on Trump targeting libel laws. 

"Is It Bush?"

I saw this in a State Parks shop in Joshua Tree and I had to ask:

     Is it Bush?

     I could be off on this one. I openly concede it. 

     I also used to think that Bush looked like Ahmadinejad –– and that both looked like my Polish landlord in Brooklyn. 

"Best Vice President Ever" B/W "Old Kellyanne Conway Joke (Who?)."

1. BBC presenter refers to Trump as "President Chump".

2. Chump today saying that Mike Pence is "a great guy and a great vice president. In fact he's one of the best vice presidents ever."

Yeah, Overcomber, and I'm sure you did a thoroughgoing analytical study, deep in research, before you came to that conclusion. I'm sure you doggedly and exhaustively read studies and biographies of all the vice presidents that came before Pence to form this scholarly opinion.

3. I found this note sitting unnoticed in a digital "Notes" file on my wife's iPhone and it was too satirically tight and manifestly on the ball and in general too fucking brilliant not to publish:

"Kellyanne Conway. I don't mean to be unkind but her face kooks like vomit.

Royal Trux cover."

[I said "kooks" when I meant "looks" although "kooks" is not without relevance when discussing this woman, who, however, is nowhere to be seen on the world stage these days. Why don't we see her curled up with her feet on the couch in the Oval Office any more? Has she actually literally been swept under a rug like the cluster of desiccated faeces she so exactly resembles?

Also, the "Royal Trux cover" in question is the one to Sweet Sixteen, a terrific album with what Pitchfork calls a "disgusting" cover. It is a toilet full of puke that seems to be forming a face –– the revolting face –– could we but have known it all those years ago –– of Kellyanne Conway!]

"The Bald President."

In the last week I've taken out two films from the Los Feliz library, The Interview and Wag The Dog. Being very apropos with reality. The former film is sadly a silly fucking shambles, unlike the other excellent Franco  Rogen apocalypse vehicle This Is The End.

I was on the phone to my brother a few days ago, recommending it improbably enough to him. Imagine his enthusiasm. Yeah. You can't. And I said, "Your favourite actor, JONAH HILL is in it."
     And he said, "Who?"
     I said, Jonah Hill. From your favourite film, The Wizard of Wall Street."
     He said, "The Wolf of Wall Street. Yes I saw the film but I found it morally dubious."
     "I thought you loved that film."
     "I do not."
      "I was sure it was you."
      This is like my father pretending he doesn't know who Dog the Bounty Hunter is.

Meanwhile Wag The Dog really is a masterpiece. Believe I saw it at the cinema at the time, but I'd forgotten everything about it.

MY POINT:

In the DVD extra featurette, which had some interesting interviews in it, Budd Schulberg recalled remarking to Elia Kazan that because of the advent of television,  Eisenhower  would be the last bald President, because bald men didn't look like proper celebrities.

"Well we've got one now," I responded to M. Schulberg on the TV screen. "We got one now, indeed we have. I mean President Trump. I'm referring to Donald 'John' Trump, AKA 'Bald Johnny.' It's a fact: PRESIDENT TRUMP IS BALD! And all that ethereal scrub, brush and humus he scrapes across his buck naked pate is so much fluff and dandruff –– shadows and dust –– a transient cobweb on the night air!"

"I Feel Comforted."

I feel comforted by the President on the knotty topic of NORTH KOREA.

Apparently standing next to a vintage Model T Ford, Overcomber Don said "You don't know exactly who you're dealing with."

Do you not.

The President also said, "We're going to see what happens."

Great sustenance of comfort from these inspiring remarks.

Yes, we are going to see out of mild remote curiosity whether North Korea fires a barrage of nuclear missiles at the west coast of America. We are going to see "what happens" in terms of being destroyed by a nuclear holocaust.

Yours,

A Los Angelean

"MOACB."

Dan Rather was on Don Lemon last night, with David Axelrod. They were talking about the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb that was dropped on Afghanistan, by which crafty Overcomber seeks to distract his base, those daytime diner attendees in Kaintuck, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabammy, Virginny &c. 

(A dingy diner somewhere in the Red State zone is where the BBC people always go to corral some Justified-style intellectuals to talk about how vigorously they support the President.)

They were referring to the bomb by its acronym, MOAB, which had cleverly also been translated to mean "Mother Of All Bombs." Then Dan Rather coughed and tweaked his bowtie and in his self-important manner remarked, "Strictly it should be called The Mother of All Conventional Bombs. There is also the Hydrogen Bomb." 

"Then the acronym would be MOACB."

"Yes."

"I.E not so catchy."

"No. But accurate.  Courage."

* * * * * * * * * * 

The voice on the street today when it turned out that the MOACB had killed thirty-six people was: "You would think with the –– the ginormity of the weapons... Thirty-six people. Somebody could do that with a truck."

"Donald Trump is The PResident?!"

There are moments still when I turn on the TV after a few hours of blissful not-thinking and then there's the "President" talking about this or that –– dead babies and disaster –– and I'll have a sudden "uncanny" moment and think, "Donald Trump is the President?!"

* * * * * * * * * *

Dunno what I expect is going to happen when Overcomberr Don gives a press conference. Did you see him yesterday with der Herr from NATO? "NATO was once worthless and ineffective and frankly a friend to terrorism, but now it's not and I give it my approval."

Drumpk [sic] "doubles down" on all his quaint and eccentric conceits. He's like Vic Mackey on The Shield. Do you remember, Vic would reel from skirmish to skirmish only making things worse each time, stacking up debts, enemies and problems down the line, but still wriggling out of every scrape somehow like a greazed pig.

Dunno what I expect. Is Drumpk finally going to break down when the lie becomes too complex and elaborate and intricate and even he's lost its thread and go: "All right, Putin's got a mound of dirt, the first-class skinny on me it's all too embarrassing, I lied about being a clean freak, I actually really like 'water sports' with high-octane hooktitutes, I resign, I resign! effective immediately and I would also like to admit to the world that my entire cabinet not to mention my family are a crowd of clown school graduates and petty criminals preticularly my wife, I mean my daughter, IVANKA! Also the people who voted for me are banished to the 'former Soviet Bloc' since they like the white trash lifestyle so much. Let them get prison tattoos and indulge in tractor-pulls with knuckledraggers from Siberia. Also I vote that we bring back Obama from his rocky Elba exile and institute him as King."

Speaking of the people who voted for him, I said to my wife yesterday I said, "Talk about terrorists. They're the terrorists! We're at their mercy, they're holding the country hostage with their lowbrow misreadings of the basic tenets of reality."

There was no punchline to that.

"Hard Times Come Again No More." / "More Usage."

Watching TV and there again is Jeff Zeleny of CNN and again the awful thought, "I like what he's doing with his hair."

What am I coming to when I'm looking enviously at this hairstyle?
Last night I was also admiring Don Lemon's spectacles.

I remember being in The Angel, Soho, in the late Nineties, and I had had a haircut and I was complaining about my hair but actually I remember I felt pretty good about it. I felt great relief that the haircut had paid off. I was going to enjoy the night's drinking.

My hair at the time was fine, doing fine, but the talk turned somehow (typical of the time) to relative looming hair loss and the phenomenon of the "island" of hair where hair is lost but some hair remains resiliently at the front. Jonny Ames-Lewis was there. He had a whole house of prematurely balding men, and each of them was losing his hair in a different style. It was like a scientific study. They all listened to Bert Jansch and The Incredible String Band.

Then Iain Robinson piped up, in a signature piece of rhetoric we used to call "The Pathetic Moment," and said, "I remember my island. I miss the days when I had an island."

We howled with laughter, and now that empty banshee wailing is recalled to me anew as I stare at Jeff Zeleny and think, "I admire what he's done with what he has."

Poor indictment.

Bad (sick).

**********

Everybody seems to be using the word "frankly" this week. Sean Spicer kept saying it when he was apologizing after he forgot all about the occurrence of the Holocaust in front of the whole universe. 

Now Trump said it when he was talking about Putin in his patented four-year-old idiom:

Frankly Putin is backing a person that's truly an evil person and I think it's very bad for Russia, I think it's very bad for Mankind, it's very bad for this world cause you see the same kids with no arms, no legs, no face... this is an animal.

It was like the last words of Dutch Schultz. Christiane Amanpour called this language "florid" incidentally.  And she was saying "frankly" too.

"On Abusage."

Two terms being used at the moment by a lot of TV pundits. My complaints.

1. "Nuclear Option."  Wish they'd stop describing the decision to allow the majority vote for Gorsuch to be sufficient as the "nuclear option" when we are perilously close to actual nuclear war.

2. "Bad Actor."  My wife is particularly annoyed by the term "bad actor" for enemy states and agents.  "They're not actors!" she says.

**********

Elsewhere...

     It seems like it is considered unAmerican and in bad taste at the moment to suggest that this tussle over Syria is all artifice, a collaboration between Putin and Trump, so I shan't say it. I am keeping my suspicions of a deeper conspiracy to myself for now, but be warned I am well-versed in the JFK case.
      A few people say the words "Wag The Dog" sotto voce with a wink. However, isn't it interesting that Trump still hasn't said a word against Putin. Somebody recently asked him about it point blank and Trump flatly ignored the question. He had his arms crossed, almost wrapped around his head, so awkward and uncomfortable was he.

"Barron Trump's IQ."

At the bottom of some fatuous website or another I was reading with great avidity ("Can Anyone Explain What the Teufel Happened in DC Comics' Convergence?"), I came across a link to an enticing piece, that promised me: "You Won't Believe Barron Trump's IQ!"

Why, I thought. Because it's so high?

"No –– because it's so shockingly fucking low."

Same thing exists online everywhere about Melania's IQ. "You'll be amazed by Melania Trump's IQ!"

IT'S A FUCKING FRACTION IS WHY!
IT'S A FUCKING MINUS NUMBER IS WHY!
IT'S FUCKING –π IS WHY!

I refuse to click on these websites because I assume that at best I am not going to get quality journalism but I am going to be roundly annoyed by the piece, and at worst I am going to get some sophisticated "trojan horse" malware from "bad actors" in the "former Soviet Union".

It's like when you are credulously seduced by one picture of a sexy-looking woman online and are drawn in to some online "slideshow" of fatuous factoids. You dully whir through thirty images. The picture of the woman never even turns up. A hard lesson learned. Whole minutes of a life lost forever, irrevocable.

There ought to be a word in Portuguese for this awful feeling.

People love to read surprising information about seemingly dumb people actually being smart. Iggy Pop is a classic example. How often have I read about his world record-breaking IQ –– and still he strikes me as moronic.

My readers might have other examples of this phenomenon, and I invite them to send them in to the usual address.

There should be webpages about seemingly clever people who are actually stupid as dirt. 

Like me for example.

"The President Opposes Killing Babies." Or, "Shocking Gas."

                                       

The Fake (Bad Sick) President didn't seem to have been following the news for the last, what, four years, because the use of forbidden chemical agents in Syria was apparently shocking transformative revelatory news to him. (You might even say it was his personal road to Damascus! Ahaha ha. My jokes are wasted on you, all right.) Maybe he was too busy fuming over Alec Baldwin's impersonation of him on SNL –– or Schwarzenneger's viewing figures –– or chastising the cast of Hamilton. Maybe he spent the last four years appraising Kim Kardashian's rump. Maybe he was consumed with the national existential question, "What does Bret Michaels hide beneath that scarf on his head? It ain't hair!"  

In true Krump style he managed to fudge the gravity of the moment, focusing with awful bathos on the gas with his trademark hyperbole. As though chemical weapons weren't horrific of themselves  until Trump had rephrased them in his signature style –– a "bad (sick) gas!" It wasn't enough that it was a nerve agent, this one "is so lethal people were shocked to hear what gas it was."

Are there certain nerve gases that the President was blasé about and he thought were entirely okay to use on babies, children and the women?

You wonder if somebody –– possibly Invokana, who speaks with that wonderful soft reasonable voice about how she is complicit –– and probably not Melanoma –– gently took Overcomber Don to one side and said, "Killing babies is wrong, Mr. President. You need to be seen visibly affirming this factoid."

The President, we must confess, was in a muddle.

"It's wrong to kill women, children and babies? Why? They make no money for the polis ––  they only consume it. Babies don't pay rent."

"Waal that's what they're saying. It is what it is. That's what are research seems to suggest."

"I hate to be pressured into this."

"Polls show it's overwhelmingly the opinion."

"I don't like doing what people want. I like to do the opposite. It's my canny signature style."

 "It's a self-truth held self-evident. Killing babies is wrong. It's a thing."

"Gah! Durn. Okay."

* * * * * * * *

While I was writing this my cereal got soggy.

Fuckin' Trump!

"Why Bannon Had To Go."

                               

In a sane universe, there are a hundred reasons for why Steve Bannon ought to go. And by "go" I mean, from the planet Earth. I mean: why he should be shuffled off the edge of the universe into a wormhole and / or the fiery bowels of an inner Gehenna.

But this not being a sane universe, mad my masters, the reason Steve was escorted from the Oval Office in his Barbour jacket remains mysterious. Let us see.

It ain't cause he's a self-confessed Hitler enthusiast.
It ain't because he eats children for lunch (although not breakfast).
It ain't because he was caught standing over a corpse holding a blood–stained knife.

It's actually because his crippling battle with adult acne, psoriasis and rosacea was becoming distracting for all in the Oval Office, not to mention "the folks on the Hill."

He has been sent away for an undetermined amount of time to be with a round the clock dermatologist.

Steve has dropsy.
He has lumbago.
He has a club foot.
Steve is a hunchback.

Steve has "distemper".
He has mange.
He has vigorous necrotic fasciitis.
He has chronic gingivitis.
Steve has adult pet dandruff.

His dandruff was causing allergies in the Oval Office. He was getting up people's noses and putting them out of joint. I mean that his "pet dander" was quite literally going up people's nostrils!!

He was considered too disgusting even for the Oval Office. Maybe Jared Kushner, that Adonis (nearly wrote "adenoid"), was sick of standing near him. He didn't want him leering at Invokana anymore.

That's the President's job!

"How to Draw the Vice President." Or, "He Hasn't Got Bette Davis Eyes."

Trump's rheumy eyes. They're so squinty and bunched up they are barely visible. They give him a most inhuman appearance. I know he can't help how he looks but goodness you sometimes think these people get the faces they deserve. It's like The Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse –– all the awful things they do are visited "in real time" on their physogs.

Kellyanne Conway (who?) looks like she spent fifteen years in THE PIT OF HELL fighting a demon.

Bannon looks like he has scabies and the Black Death not to mention a vitamin deficiency. 

Sean Spicer looks like a Dick Tracy villain. 

Here is how to go about drawing MIKE PENCE. 

Trump and Spicer and Mike Pence all have eyes that are sort of hooded by being downturned at their outside edges. They're like fleshy blinkers, or exterior cataracts. Maybe this is why their politics are the way they are! They have awful right wing tunnel vision. 

"Bad (sick) guys!"

If you want to draw them they all have the same odd shortcoming that makes them look sad and slightly insane. Like the stereotypical image of the crazy person in maximum denial of the common facts of reality. Like people on the verge of tears because they are so happy and autistically deluded:

Their faces are grinning so manically that they are "literally" squeezing their own eyeballs out using their cheek muscles!

From this useful starting point you can draw most of the Trump Oval Office. Not that handsome bastard Kushner –– for him you'll have to look at my article "How to Draw Malkmus" and then affix a Mike Pence haircut to Malkmus's head. But you can drawn Old Krump himself:

And you can draw Sean Spicer. Also: they all also have a notable underbite. Were they chosen for office for this reason? Is there a form of weird anti-eugenics afoot? 

I chose to forge ahead and draw Mike Pence from this basis but you can draw anyone –– as long as they have outwardly turned eyes:

Now doesn't my effort look just like old Mike "Wouldn't Give One" Pence?

Now as a bonus here's a picture I accidentally took of our living room rug:

"The Weekend With the President."

This has got nothing to do with Trump, but on the weekend the President plays golf and plays with his tie and makes fart noises with his stupid lips and shows his confidential dockets freely to random gawkers at Mar a Lago, so there's nothing to say over the weekend unless Devin Nunes performs some grandstanding stunt and this week it seems like his grandstanding stunt is to bury his head in the turf in his garden, far away from his critics on "the Hill".*

I've been watching Unit One with Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish cop show from the Oughts. The head of the homicide department on the show is called Ingrid Dahl, and I have fallen into a light crush on her.

I was watching her with a dreamy expression, unable to fathom quite why I was so enchanted. "Bloody hell," I thought to myself, "my tastes become more middle-class by the day."

Also, my Mum called today and said that Didcot had been voted the most average town in Britain.
Showing some of that hometown pride I responded, "That's a poor show for the country. If Didcot is the average, I'd hate to see the worst places."

You probably need to know Didcot to find that interesting or amusing.

_________________________________________________________

* After writing this I learnt that Trump had all but declared war on North Korea and China over the weekend. My remarks about Ingrid Dahl and Dicot remain of paramount relevance however.

Plus there's not a lot of humour to be found in the prospect of global nuclear war.

"Kushner and the Jicks."

Jared Kushner and Steve Malkmus. Have they ever been seen in the same room at the same time?

(Why would they?)

I'm trying to say that they look alike.

"Pushback is The Word of the Day."

The word of the day on the "Hill" in Washington is "pushback." Everybody is saying it.

All around the world today, the kilo is the measure! 
Once you got the funds you got the panties man.       –– Ghostface Killah.

Also: Mark Warner, the Democrat heading the Senate investigation into Overcomber Don's treasonous buffoonery keeps saying the same story. He repeats endlessly, "When I started this investigation I knew it was the most important thing I would do in my life. Now I am into it, I can only say I know it to be so but doubly as much."

It's a cool story, but I don't know if it bears the repeated tellings!

"The Last Words of Dutch Spicer."

Sean Spicer announced the White House's assault on "opioids". Is this nineteenth-century London? Is this Edwin Drood? Are "ICE" workers going to invade the opium dens of old Limehouse and throw out the Chinamen with the pillbox hats and the long clay pipes?

At one point, in the middle of his rambling stuttering stream of consciousness, Spicer also seemed to be demonizing "psychedelics".

That's funny –– I assumed that he gobbles psychedelics like pretzel M&Ms.

He also revealed that they have set "Fat Chrisser" Christie on the case to conquer the awful abuse of opioids (and presumably psychedlics) in these our States. Good thinking there. Chris has distinguished himself on the public stage for his immense self-restraint and discipline in avoiding addictive substances.

"Finally, after all these years of national suffering on a mass scale we are trying to put an end to this deleterious problem that has plagued the whole country for decades," Sean Spicer said. "I mean to say, we have found a use for Chris Christie."

"I (DON'T) Get It."

Sean Spicer's favourite line to journalists is: "I get it."

Dear Sean Spicer:  No you don't.

I spent about fifteen minutes trying to draw Sean Spicer for this flimsy day's entry, failing systematically. You'd think it would be easy with that broad forehead of his and his underbite. What I can tell you, if you want to try it at home, is that he doesn't have any eyebrows.

Were they shaved off by Chairman Don in a prank?

"Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit –– But Trump is the Only President That is an Orange."

"How can I be a Nazi? I'm colored myself! 

I'm orange!"

Overcomber Don has audacity, you have to give it to him. He should pen a book: The Hopelessness of Audacity. 

When he probably should have been doing some work, he was noodling googling and golfing through Youtube, watching old Bobby Lee  MAD TV sketches and Henry Rollins clips when he came across a Snoop Dogg video that had a bright orange Trump clown in it getting shot. 

Overcomber Don immediately tweeted, "Not fair! If this had been done about Obama imagine the outcry. Unfair (sick) disaster." 

He seemed to be accusing his critics of racism. 

What racism?

Don: "You're all prejudiced against orange people."

Incidentally Sean Spicer seemed to have acquired the trademark distinguished Trump white bags under the eyes. I seriously wondered if Trump was coercing with menaces his stooges and henchmen, forcing them to go on the sunbed. They are being blackmailed to get orange skin. Are they all waiting til this is all over so they can line up to write their exposés of the regime? Four Years Before the Sunbed.

* * * * * * * * * *

To other matters. I've watched two shows over the last two nights where Masha Gessen was the expert talking head, peeling back the curtains in the Putin Kremlin. Didn't know the woman before two days ago now she is everywhere. 

I called her a "talking head" but strictly speaking she looks more like a member of the Velvet Underground. 

Not Moe Tucker. Lou Reed. 

Seeing her on PBS's Meet the Press last night I was gripped by her cool appearance. I felt somehow strengthened to hear her testimony. I said, "She looks like she could take on Putin in a no–rules cage match in an abandoned Siberian diamond mine –– or indeed at the bottom of the celebrated Kola Superdeep Borehole, "the world's deepest artificial pit." 

I'm glad she's on our side!

"Siberian Junk / Those Cows."

Did you read or possibly hear on your radio about the little old man whose son overdosed on heroin and so, naturally, raging and pulsating with righteous grief, he went to a Trump Rally looking for answers, how to stop this from happening again ("for somebody to blame").

He had decided he would illumination on the Trump campaign trail.

Trump was awfully sympathetic to his plight (gotta gettum votes boy) and Don the Overcomber pared his nails while he said said "Yes it's awfully tragic awfully disastrous sick bad, well it's Shillary's fault and I tell yeou this wouldn't happen in Russia". (They send junkies to Siberia.)

The man said, "Ah'm just tickled pink [orange]. Ah'm going to shew up at all your rallies with just my faihful guitar and my good arm and strum some old cowboy songs about how great you are and how bad Shillary is and the drugs that she so artfully peddles to the young men. Woman: her ways are intricate and malevolent and she has her devilish designs to beguile us menfolk."

"Ye-esssss," said Trump, staring dully into the back wall of infinity.

Now it transpires that the man whose son died of a heroin overdose after playing hundreds of Trump rallies is awfully disappointed with Trump. It occurs to him after playing hundreds of Trump rallies that he isn't quite certain Trump is of an entirely veracious character. It occurs to him after playing hundreds of Trump rallies that maybe he didn't actually sit down and give this the properest amount of thought.

He wonders to himself in those dark nights if Overcomber Don is quite the churchgoing Christian he claimed to be.

Elsewhere on BBC America there was an interview with a disgruntled (or "dismooed"!) farmer in the Corn Belt who felt like Trump had seduced, abandoned and betrayed him. To which I responded, "Aw diddums –– you dummy. Did the nasty politician mislead you? YOU HALFWIT OF COURSE HE MISLED YOU!!! You're fired!"

Nevertheless he had some amazing cows.
They look like they have been "gene-spliced" with

1) A lop-eared rabbit
2) A camel.

Who are these cows and exactly what do they know? Are they a unique product of the Chernobyl "Steppes"?

Are these cows even real? Or were they automata doctored by young Latvians ("Latverians") with a darknet version of malware and a 3D printer? Are these Feejee Mermaids in the Twenty-First century? 

Is this whaddayoucallit is this "fake news"? 

"Trump's Got a Mullet."

(Sing to the tune of "Sal's Got a Meatskin")

Trump's got a mullet don't you know
Trump's got a mullet don't you know
Trump's got a mullet don't you know
He ain't got much on top though it's obvious and yet he somehow bends light around his head using 
      secret radar camouflage technology.

"Bannon's Just Got To Be Bannon."

     

     A new cliche in Washington circles. "X has got to be X."
     Somebody said it about a lion: "a lion's got to be a lion."
     Then David Brooks said "Bannon's got to be Bannon."

     I said to my wife, "Who said, 'A lion's got to be a lion, Bannon's got to be Bannon'?"
     She said, "It was a National Geographic site, I think, about the lion. David Brooks said it about Bannon."
      "What, so they weren't placed next to each other? I thought it was 'A lion's got to be a lion AND Bannon's got to be Bannon'. X = X ergo Y must = Y."
      "I don't think so."

     I love the thought of all these backcountry Freedom Caucus Republicans backchatting Bannon, because they're the ones he claims to represent. The Kentucky knuckledraggers. All those dispirited daughters of the Confederacy and the former kleagles of the klavern sitting in shitty cantinas in Texas or Alabamy or Iowa or Ohio or Podunklahoma staring at Fox News as the BBC America reporters would come round asking them what they think about people of colour-that-ain't-strictly-pink and transgender toilet usage.

Bannon went in there, Doncomber's bright red attack mutt, and thought he could direct them around like he does Ole Pap from Duckwad Dynasty, but he was badly wrong. He misread the times. Like society gal Invokana on the day all the refugees wre being turned around he was "tone deaf." One of them said, through a plug of chaw, "Yall ain't my paw."

Incidentally, describe Bannon to me without using the words "annihilated," "desiccated," fetid," "revenant," "dandruff," "adult acne," "necrotic teeth," "palsied," "psoriatic," "used-up," or "virulent." I defy you.

"Don't 'Tapp' Me Bro." Or, "T.R.U.M.P."

Overcomber Don's misspelling is what I might in my elevated patrician way call "Jacksonian." This is not because Jackson's spelling was famously bad –– although it was –– see Allen Walker Read's excellent "Could Andrew Jackson Spell?" in American Speech 38 (1963) – but because in the era of Jackson the common man (that log cabin hard cider crass asshole) was for the first time celebrated in popular literature, often in the guise of the misspelling, vulgar hick.

Hosts of hack writers in the 1830s would write newspaper squibs about rural protagonists, country confidence men or village psychotics selling tin and paper wares, going to the  city or the centre of government to bring their style of "savvy" to elite politicians. It might be Albany, it might be Washington. The joke remained the same, rus in urbe.

He might not be from the country exactly, but he pretends like he's friends to the rural dwellers in Kaintuck and Mizzuruh, and Trump being a vulgar interloper (nearly wrote intercomber) from Queens or was it the Bronx was always shut out of the aristocracy of Old New York.

Oh boo hoo.

Trump's allegations of Obama trying to "tapp" his phones at Trump Tower was in this Jack Downing, Sut Lovingood, Birdofredum Sawin vein. White trash attacking men of colour out of contumely. Maybe you've read Matthew Whittier's "Ethan Spike" pro–abolitionism letters out of Portland Maine?  Probably you haven't. Or Lowell's Biglow Papers. Probably not as I said.

Trump's peculiar spelling –– his interesting grammar. His routine manner of lying. His back-country scrabbling around. His fucked up way of thinking and acting and doing!

O for a Lowell today.

O for an Artemus Ward!

Sometimes I wonder what Pound would have made of Trump. He used to have a weak spot for demagogues as we know.

New "phunny phellow" name for the Pres: "Donald Tapp".

"Tapp – tapp – tapping on Tosspot's wig."

"Tapper Don." Instead of "Trapper John" from out of M.A.S.H.

"B.J. Honeycutt."
"B.J. Wiretapp" from S.M.U.S.H.
"Blow Job Wire Tapp, Agent of H.Y.D.R.A."
"Doctor Mindcomber, Agent of COBRA."

Write in today and say which you think is the best new name for our glorious 45th illustrious President. 

"Dump Truck / Chinatown."

Today I had a lot of work and then we watched Chinatown in the evening and then we watched the DVD extra, and so we didn't give much thought to Don the Overcomber for a change. Not much. I'd flip to CNN to see what Don Lemon was saying. Big story seemed to be about Trump sitting in a truck.

Trump truck.
Trumk.
Dump Truck.
Dumb Fucking Dump Trump.

THAT DUMBFUCK DUMP TRUMP SITTING IN A TRUCK on the White House lawn pretending he was driving a "big rig". This seemed to have been a PR coup. "He's a big kid he's great with folks," they were cooing –– even Don Lemon's face folded in irresistibly at the big galoot.

Only I had my wits about me enough to think, "He has literally the blood of millions on his misshapen hands." So I was wantonly misusing the word "literally" –– so what. This is an age of lies.

(At this moment the ghost of my sensei appears before me to deliver that classic filmic good advice: "When you use your enemy's inferior strategies you become no better than your enemy.")

At the end of Chinatown, when Jake's assistant (the one who isn't Crispin Glover's father)  famously says, "It's Chinatown," Jack Nicholson's PTSD expression and the leering of John Huston's abusive father character, who swaggers and shit-grins through all his sins and triumphs and prevails, I laughed and said "It's the absolute triumph of evil!"

That familiar cocktail of municipal incompetence  and petty corruption (here the LAPD and the DWP) and cynicism. Trump had just said to a Time magazine reporter, "I'm President and you're not." The finale of Chinatown was so redolent of our lives all of our lives since November and more especially since January. Any time you see patent hand-wringing malcontents on TV you are now reminded of the Oval Office crowd. I nodded my head at Jack Nicholson's catatonic face. "That's how I felt after the election."

* * * * * * * * * *

Incidentally, I cannot imagine for the life of me Overcomber Don using the words "somewhat vindicated". I think this is a distillation of what he probably actually said. What he probably said. "I won. I'm President. You're not. You're fired."