The sun was directly overhead on the longest day of the year. No shadows. I pushed a button on my phone. My neighbor Swamp Rabbit leaned back in his broken rocking chair, waiting to hear some songs that would blot out the present and help him relive happy summer memories.
“Swimsuit Issue” by Sonic Youth played and “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden.
“Turn that shit off.” he said, choking on his beer. “Sounds like the end of the world.”
“I’m just messing with you,” I said. “That’s not from my feel-good list.”
I made an adjustment and “Sunny Afternoon” played. It’s like lying on a beach chair in a cool breeze, watching the waves roll in. Swamp Rabbit drank up and smiled, but “Melt” by Barney Cortez and “Girl” by Beck seemed to unsettle him. He’s of a certain age, so it takes him a long time to warm up to songs he hasn’t heard a million times.
“Under the Boardwalk” reminded him of a cheap date in Wildwood, NJ. “Warmth of the Sun” brought tears to his eyes. Or maybe his allergies did that.
“This is great,” he said. “These songs are so good, they bring back memories of stuff that probably didn’t even happen.”
Irony is a bitch. Last week, just in time for Juneteenth, an appeals court reversed a previous judge’s decision and ruled that Trump and his minions can replace the exhibit panels at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia. This means they are free to install their own panels, which de-emphasize and arguably whitewash the story of the nine people enslaved by George Washington at the site.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit heard the news and said, “What’s so ironic? What’s gonna be in the replacement exhibit?”
I told him the appeals court ruling is ironic because it undermines the meaning of the Juneteenth holiday by allowing the Trump gang to suggest it wasn’t all bad to be enslaved by Washington, who privately acknowledged that slavery was evil even as he used it to his advantage. The judges apparently were persuaded by the wording used by the National Park Service in composing the replacement panels:
Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.
“That’s kitsch, not history,” I said. “Whoever wrote it doesn’t know what autonomy means.”
“Those lucky slaves,” Swamp Rabbit said, acknowledging the irony. “Free tickets and a roof over their heads. They didn’t even have to pay rent.”
Only a few of the new panels mention the individual slaves. The revised version of the exhibit text reads more like a homogenized overview of slavery in general, meant for tourists – slavery was a terrible institution and here’s why, but the past is dead, somebody give me a cheeseburger.
Swamp Rabbit stroked his pathetic goatee and said, “The new panels don’t make no sense. I thought the exhibit was supposed to be about what it was like to be a slave in Washington’s house.”
I told him the new exhibit makes perverted sense if you realize it’s part of the Trump gang’s campaign to remove or alter all exhibits at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
“This one just happens to be in our hometown,” I said.
I couldn’t help thinking of Cynthia M. Rufe, the district judge who ordered the Park Service to put back the original panels when the Trump gang had them removed in February. She wrote, “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts… It does not.”
Years before becoming Donald Trump’s vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” That may have been his last truthful moment. Now he’s one of Dear Leader’s most prolific liars, and most of his lies tend to be whoppers. He outdid himself last week while arguing that his boss was negotiating an honorable end to his disastrous war with Iran:
If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was appalled. “This dude went to Yale but he’s an ignoramus. I guess he didn’t take no history courses.”
He was revisiting our recent “are they willfully ignorant or just stupid?” debate. I told him that Vance only pretends to be an ignoramus. He surely knows World II ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan to allied forces. “He’s a big phony who enjoys lying,” I said.
My favorite Vance lie is from 2024, when he repeatedly told the media that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating pet owners’ dogs and cats. When he finally had to admit this was a lie, he said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
That tells you all you need to know about the guy who’s next in line for the presidency.
Footnote: Still waiting for Victor Cortez, Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer, to issue a verdict on whether it’s fair to refer to Vance as Trump’s Herman Goring.
We were discussing yes-men last week when I raised a question: How do Donald Trump’s sycophants match up with Adolph Hitler’s? I mentioned Rudolph Hess, the longtime Hitler comrade who flew solo to Scotland with the idea of persuading the British to make a deal with Germany. Hess had fallen out of favor with his beloved Fuhrer and was desperate to please him. Who in Trump’s orbit would demonstrate such servility?
My hard-drinking neighbor Swamp Rabbit dissed me for equating Trump with Hitler. Then he said, “Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick for attorney general. He went beyond flattering Trump and begged for the job. He said ‘I love you, sir‘ in front of the cameras.”
I grudgingly conceded that Blanche matched up pretty well with Hess — one point for Swamp Rabbit. When it was his turn, he challenged me to name the Trump propagandist who could be a stand-in for Hitler’s evil runt Joseph Goebbels.
“Stephen Miller,” I said. “I’m surprised he can say anything without making a Nazi salute.”
My turn again. I asked Swamp Rabbit which Trump weasel most closely resembles Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s heartless Holocaust architect. He named Christi Noem, the now-fired Homeland Security chief. Last summer, she primped in front of cages crammed with torture victims at a Salvadoran concentration camp. My pick was Marco Rubio, who has bragged about shutting down USAID, a move tantamount to condemning massive numbers of poor people to death by disease or starvation.
Swamp Rabbit balked. “Rubio is a sneaky little suck-up but he ain’t no Himmler. JD Vance should get that role.”
I told him Vance is better imagined as Trump’s Herman Goring. He competes with Rubio to be Trump’s most loyal stooge, just as Himmler and Goring jousted to be Hitler’s.
But Swamp Rabbit wouldn’t concede the point. “I’m tired of this game, Odd Man. Trump’s gang is evil, but they ain’t in the same league with Hitler’s mass-murderin’ goons. Vance is a practicing Catholic. Miller is a Jew.”
I demurred. “They’ve all stood by a convicted criminal who tried to overturn a presidential election and assembled a private army that persecutes nonwhites. They’re on board with his rejection of the Constitution, his support for Vladimir Putin, and his use of the White House as a cash withdrawal machine for himself and his crooked family. Where Trump leads, they follow without question. You really think they wouldn’t match the crimes of Hitler’s crew if given the opportunity?”
We decided to stop bickering and let a third party judge the match game. Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer Victor Cortez is due to drop by soon and he doesn’t like to be overruled.
Footnote: I wanted to match Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with Dr. Josef Mengela until I remembered Mengela wasn’t in Hitler’s Berlin mob. Oh well…
My first thought was oh no, not another article about Jack Kerouac. This one is in the New Yorker and is by Joyce Johnson, who has written well on many subjects, including Kerouac, her romantic partner in the late 1950s and her longtime friend. He’s been dead since 1969, and his life and work have been picked over by a million critics but…
I devoured the article anyway, looking for new minutiae about the On the Road author, a moody guy with working-class roots who was hyped as a rebel against mid-20th century conformity and used decades after his death as a sales tool for the Gap (“Kerouac wore khakis”) and other corporations. He alienated straight-arrow types and appealed to contrarians, foes of the status quo, artists and academics, avant-garde musicians, hardcore outliers, parttime bohemians —
“And aimless, no-account bums like you,” my rowdy neighbor Swamp Rabbit said.
I tried to explain my conflicted feelings. Kerouac, only 47 when he died, was a poetic visionary, a sentimental bloviator, a keen observer of social history in the making, a pathetic victim of America’s celebrity culture. I can’t think of another author I’ve read and changed my mind about so often over the years.
Swamp Rabbit snickered. “You ain’t changed your mind. You badmouth Kerouac for becoming a drunken slob, but you still think he’s cool.”
Swamp Rabbit, a slob himself, reminded me that I still own dog-eared copies of On the Road, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels and a half-dozen other Kerouac novels, and works by or about William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and other writers often lumped together with Kerouac as exemplars of the Beat Generation, a term that describes young men who felt beat down and disillusioned by the pervasive materialism of post-World War II American culture.
Kerouac was the Beat who clicked with the public and became what the media now calls a countercultural icon. He was on “The Tonight Show” with Steve Allen and in glossy magazines, and his cross-country adventures with the legendary Neal Cassidy inspired “Route 66,” a TV series about two young guys on an endless road trip, looking for the American Dream or the meaning of life or something. Kerouac epitomized the spontaneity that often distinguished the Beats from more conventional writers. He didn’t rely on plots or outlines but rather on his lyrical, open-ended depictions of life as he lived it.
Swamp Rabbit was laughing again. “Your big words don’t fool me. You like them Beats because they were into sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, like you.”
I told him it was sex, drugs and bebop jazz in their case. Kerouac, a Charlie Parker fan, called his writing style “spontaneous bop prosody.” He identified with outliers as diverse as Whitman and Dostoevsky and sought spiritual enlightenment through his reading and writing. He wasn’t a dilletante or a fake.
“Unlike some people I could name,” Swamp Rabbit said.
I gave him a dirty look. He asked if I’d learned anything from Johnson’s article.
“Only that the Beats should have treated women better, and that Kerouac’s best writing still reminds me of what it feels like to be young and free.”
“Free from what?” he said.
He’s my neighbor but I couldn’t resist: “From guys like you who are dead already but don’t know it.”
Footnote: Kerouac read his poetry on a bunch of audio recordings with Steve Allen on piano. Allen was the Steven Colbert of his era, except that he didn’t get thrown off TV for being a liberal.
Another: Kerouac came close to suing the producers of “Route 66” and the Chevrolet car company for stealing “the characters and theme” of On the Road.
My ill-mannered neighbor Swamp Rabbit staggered into my shack today and looked over my shoulder as I typed. “Uh-oh, more crap about that lapdog who wrecked ’60 Minutes.’ Why don’t you gripe about something closer to home? How about them Uber Eats robots in Center City?”
I told him I wasn’t writing about Trump-approved CBS News boss Bari Weiss. This one was about longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley, who publicly shamed Nick Bilton, the underqualified yes man Weiss chose to replace Tanya Simon, the show’s highly regarded executive producer.
“Speaking truth to power” is a cliche but it might be the best way to describe what Pelley said yesterday when the remaining staffers at “60 Minutes” met the new boss. “Why should we trust you?” Pelley asked while listing all the reasons Bilton could not be trusted to help restore the show’s reputation, which Weiss tarnished months ago by shelving a story about the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Pelley was all fired up. “You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” he said to Bilton after naming some of his recently fired coworkers.
Staffers were treated to bagels but received no convincing explanation for why changes are necessary at “60 Minutes,” which has been riding high in the ratings for 50 years. “Enjoy the bagels,” Bilton said as he slinked away from the meeting. (Weiss didn’t show up for it.)
“Your legion of readers will be up in arms,” Swamp Rabbit said when I finished typing. “They’ll grab their pitchforks and march on CBS News when they read what you wrote.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, ignoring his sarcasm. “But it feels good to write about somebody who fights back when the corporate zombies take over.”
A few hours later Pelley was fired — big surprise, right? — for standing up to the yes men and woman who make it possible for billionaires and their lackeys to control and suppress information about Trump’s fascist regime. Let’s hope this isn’t the end of the story.
Yes men, by definition, are denizens of government and the corporate world who bow to authority, no questions asked, in order to get ahead. Not surprisingly, as the fight for gender parity in the workplace intensifies, we’re seeing more and more yes women who are as eager as their male counterparts to do the boss’s bidding.
“You must be talking about Trump’s gang,” my scruffy neighbor Swamp Rabbit said as he nursed his first beer of the day. “Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard and so on. Girls who know how to have fun even though they work for a monster. My favorite is that wrestlin’ lady who got AI mixed up with A1, the steak sauce. The Secretary of Education.”
When he stopped laughing, I told him I actually was thinking of CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss, who just fired Sharyn Alfonsi, the Emmy Award-winning reporter on “60 Minutes,” for exposing the truth behind the Trump gang’s deportation of hundreds of immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. I commented on this in a previous post.
Weiss is a right-winger who is “in” because CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance, the huge company headed by billionaire David Ellison, who knew that further expansion of Paramount would be blocked unless he sucked up to Donald Trump by hiring someone who would muzzle “60 Minutes.” Alfonsi is “out” because she fought back when Weiss delayed the airing of the deportation story. Bottom line: Ellison is a yes man for Trump and Weiss is Ellison and Trump’s yes woman.
Weiss has made other personnel cuts at “60 Minutes” — staffers despise her — while professing to “widen the aperture of the stories we tell and the voices we listen to.” In practice, this will mean no investigative stories critical of Donald Trump and his authoritarian regime and abandonment of the journalistic standards that made “60 Minutes” the best-rated and most respected news show in American TV history.
Swamp Rabbit flashed a gruesome grin. “Look on the bright side, Odd Man. Trump gets more like Hitler every day. He’s self-destructing.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But that’s not keeping Weiss from destroying CBS News.”
“That’s a pretty vulgar word, Odd Man. I’ll bet they ain’t using it at the Wharton business school.”
“Don’t be so sure, Swamp Rabbit. Everything’s vulgar now, including Wharton.”
The word is “enshittification,” coined by the super-prolific tech writer/novelist Cory Doctorow to describe the process through which previously user-friendly digital platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and so on — are fouled up by hi-tech and market forces as old as supply and demand.
“Do you remember when Facebook — now part of Meta — was just an easy way to communicate with acquaintances too far away to talk to in person? Or when Twitter wasn’t owned by a fascist zillionaire who uses it as a platform to promote kooks and bigots?”
My neighbor didn’t answer my questions, probably because he avoids the Internet except to order from Bilbo’s, our local beer distributor. I told him that Facebook, after it attracted hordes of regular users, became a popular destination for people who want to sell things. Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies enriched themselves as paying advertisers flocked to their platform like flies to honey, or something less pleasant. The platform is thick with flies now, no longer a fun place to hang out. Brought low by its greedy owners and their algorithms. Enshittified.
“No wonder enshittification was named word of the year in 2023 by the American Dialect Society, whatever that is,” I said. “Someone should write a song about it. All those syllables sound good if you drag them out. I’m thinking of ‘Anticipation,’ by that popstar whose father was a hotshot book publisher. Corny, but a massive hit. Before your time, I think.”
“This is the same thing you complained about a few weeks ago. Get over it, Odd Man. People like to buy things. They got nothing against being used and suckered. Enshittification is just capitalism doing what it always does. It happens to all businesses after a while.”
“It happens to governments, too,” I said.
Footnote: Doctorow introduced the enshittification concept on his blog, then turned it into a book. He wrote, “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, says solar farms aren’t a good alternative to gas and coal because “when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.”
Swamp Rabbit’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. “The Interior boss said that? You’re putting me on, right?”
I told him that the congressman couldn’t believe it either. He ironically told Burgum about an invention called the battery. But Donald Trump’s flunkies are irony-proof; they merely repeat what the criminal-in-chief wants to hear. When confronted with the truth they respond with willful ignorance, as Paul Krugman noted.
“Willful’s got nothin’ to do with it,” Swamp Rabbit said. “They’re just stupid.”
“Au contraire, grisly man. The high-level MAGA suck-ups realize Trump always lies, but they make believe his lies are true. They know it’s not healthy to disagree with Dear Leader, they would lose their jobs. Worse than that, they might lose their share of the grift.”
Swamp Rabbit looked unconvinced, so I tried again: “Do you really think Cabinet members believe Trump’s lies? That renewable energy is a hoax, or that he can bring down grocery and energy prices and destroy Iran at the same time?”
I said Trumpers who don’t understand basic science or supply and demand or the art of the con might be authentically stupid and therefore partly off the hook for the harm Trump’s policies are doing to the world. But Trumpers who know Dear Leader is pushing dangerous bullshit — the flunkies at the top of his regime — are just as guilty of criminal behavior as he is. They’re willfully ignorant, not stupid, and deserve to be prosecuted along with him, if and when the rule of law is restored in this country.
I asked Swamp Rabbit if he accepted my premise. He snapped open a can of beer and yawned. “They’re willful, they’re stupid. What’s the difference? We’re all screwed either way.”
Footnote: Burgum defended Trump’s ballroom and other enormously expensive vanity projects while trying to minimize the damage that would result from his department’s plan to cut $1 billion from the National Park Service budget. This was at the same House hearing where he learned about batteries and responded to positive data about wind and solar by claiming “the data’s lying.”
The Trump administration just released formerly classified files related to UFO sightings, and my neighbor Swamp Rabbit couldn’t be happier. He’s hoping the new information will confirm the existence of extraterrestrials he claims have landed in Bog Water Homes, the swampy development where we live. He thinks they want to befriend us.
“You’re crazy,” I told him. “Super-advanced aliens could land anywhere. Why would they choose some swampy place in South Philly? And why would they think we’re friendly?”
I referred him to a recent satirical piece by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who noted that we sometimes imagine space creatures as benign — think of David Bowie’s “Starman” or Steven Spielberg’s E.T. — but more often make dark assumptions about them:
If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.
What we know is that many humans are afraid of Earth aliens — more accurately, the undocumented immigrant workers that MAGA enthusiasts call illegals. Our criminal president calls them rapists and murderers. His ICE thugs jail and deport them whenever possible and would probably treat outer space aliens better than they treat aliens from other countries.
“There’s more to it than that,” my crusty neighbor said. “MAGA peeps can’t live with illegal aliens, but they can’t live without ’em.”
He showed me an article about a white state senator in deep-red Idaho who’s on the outs with neighbors who depend on undocumented workers to help their dairy farms survive. She hopes her anti-immigrant stance will generate enough votes to keep her in office, even though it hurts her neighbors and her husband, who does business with the farm owners.
It seems the senator and her supporters are living in their own private Idaho, in little towns where they can’t admit the country must use immigrant workers and OK their presence here — more of them, not fewer — or suffer labor shortages and soaring rates of inflation. But they can’t have it both ways.
It’s a story most mainstream media outlets are failing to tell as part of a larger story that includes the disastrous Iran war and tariffs that are hurting everybody but the super-rich.
“I’m bummed,” Swamp Rabbit said. “If I make friends with them space aliens I might try to hitch a ride when they take off for their home planet.”
Footnote: Today is Mother’s Day, a reminder that the thriving restaurant scene in Philadelphia, my hometown, is fueled by the cheap labor of undocumented aliens. In fact, “Philadelphia’s economic vitality increasingly depends on its foreign-born population,” according to recent studies. Does anyone other than the MAGA mob believe red-state economies aren’t just as dependent on foreign workers?
Odd Man Out 