"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."