It was a rainy Easter Sunday, but the breaking news was good. It seems Mary Magdelene and her squad have rolled away the stone in the Holy Land and found that Jesus’ tomb is empty.
“He is risen,” Swamp Rabbit said.
I nodded. “Either that or he slipped out the backdoor.”
“Don’t matter to me, Odd Man. I just hope he took the Easter Bunny with him. That guy is a pain in my ass.”
He told me he woke up this morning and found the Easter Bunny had filled his Easter basket with Peeps, those sugar-coated marshmallow confections shaped like little chicks or bunnies. He’d been hoping the Bunny would leave him KitKats and caramels and jellybeans.
“Peeps are disgusting,” he said. “Even when I wash them down with Old Grand-Dad.”
I told him it was probably our neighbor Naomi Crankshaft who sneaked into his shack and left the Peeps, not the Easter Bunny. Naomi lives on the north side of Bog Water Homes, our development in South Philly, and she used to work as a publicist for the Peeps company, writing clever ad copy.
“She’s been sweet on you for months. She likes her men unwashed and inebriated.”
“But I don’t like peeps who like Peeps,” he said. “And it ain’t likely any woman would be sweet on a guy in my condition.”
“You don’t understand MAGA women,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said. “The way they see it, there ain’t no harm in Donald Trump saying he likes to grab ’em by their you-know-whats. They don’t badmouth him when he kicks them to the curb. They stand by their man, and I use that word loosely.”
We were discussing our felon-in-chief’s firing of Pam Bondi, the former attorney general who helped destroy the credibility of the Justice Department on Trump’s behalf. Bondi was Mean Girl #1, even meaner and more loyal than Kristi Noem, the other woman he recently chucked out of his Cabinet.
“Bondi got caught misleading the media about the Epstein files, and she tried to prosecute the peeps on Trump’s shitlist even though they didn’t break any laws,” Swamp Rabbit said.” The hog monster don’t like it when somebody makes him look stupid, especially when they’re just followin’ his stupid orders.”
She has “bad karma.” my ne’er-do-well neighbor concluded. I usually roll my eyes at this expression but not this time. Early in her brief tenure, Mean Girl #1 became angry because photos of Joe Biden and Kamela Harris were still on display at the Justice Department. She personally took them down and demoted a respected department employee who had failed to remove them sooner.
A day after Bondi was fired, MS Now reported that a photo of her had been quickly removed from a Justice Department wall and tossed into an office trash can. Justice Department officials claim the trashing report is “fake news,” but it’s common knowledge that Bondi is despised by many career employees at the department.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was reminding me that I’d promised to take part in a No Kings rally, like millions of other people who are fed up with Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to end democracy in America.
“Go away,” I said. “I don’t like slogans or placards or crowds. I’m with Groucho Marx — I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”
He sipped whiskey from his broken cup and glared at me. “Nobody wants to be in a club with you either, Odd Man. It ain’t about that.”
I told him yes, of course I was going to a local rally, it’s the sort of event even borderline misanthropes like me shouldn’t duck. More than 1,300 No Kings rallies were taking place nationwide on Saturday to protest the Trump administration’s brutal approach to immigration reform, its obscenely wasteful war in Iran, its attack on our First Amendment rights, and its elimination of clean energy initiatives and aid programs that helped millions of poor people around the world.
This was the third set of nationwide rallies staged by No Kings — the others were in June and October — and the biggest yet. All were prompted by the fear that a fascist takeover of the U.S. government is in progress.
“I’m heading out now,” I said, noting that the Philadelphia rally was miles away from Bog Water Homes, the swampy development we live in.
Swamp Rabbit sipped from his cup again and said, “I’ll catch up with you when I finish my breakfast.”
I jogged up Broad Street to City Hall and into a swarm of protesters young and old, many of them costumed and/or carrying signs, one of which read HEY TRUMP. NO ONE PAID US TO BE HERE. WE ALL HATE YOU FOR FREE. A woman with a bass drum strapped to her back collided with me. The Statue of Liberty came to life and handed me a copy of lines from a famous poem that seems ironic in Trump World: “…Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…”
A big crowd had a will of its own; you move with it or you don’t move at all. In his book Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti described the feeling this way: “Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body.”
The body of protesters in Philly moved up Benjamin Franklin Parkway to a stage where various speakers took turns reminding them that the rally was about urging friends and neighbors to vote in the midterms and get involved with groups fighting the Trump agenda. It wasn’t just about hating Trump.
Groucho would have laughed at Trump. I don’t know what he would have thought of No Kings, but the Marx Brothers’ absurdist classic Duck Soup, if remade, could easily be about the attack on Iran by Trump and his incompetent goons.
Footnote: Groucho would have liked the woman at the rally who handed me a watch cap to deal with the weather, which was colder than I’d expected.
My boozy neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were playing in the same key for a change. We agreed that the world has come a long way since the 2015 Paris Agreement.
A long way down, that is. We sat on his wobbly front porch with my laptop and tried to process the most recent bad-news story about the environment:
The Trump administration announced it will pay nearly $1 billion to French energy giant TotalEnergies in exchange for the company abandoning plans to build offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean and instead pursue fossil fuel projects in the U.S.
“It don’t make no sense,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I know the hog monster don’t like wind farms but why spend all that taxpayer money to kill something that would power a million homes?”
Forget about making sense, I told him. We’re talking about a delusional sociopath who’s forever seeking revenge on those who cross him. Check out his response to the death of Robert Mueller: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
The mad king issues decrees, knowing that Congress and the courts are too weak or corrupt to overrule him. He turned a billion dollars meant for renewable energy into a gift for the fossil fuel industry in order to strike back at Joe Biden, who defeated him in 2020 and helped close the wind farms deal with TotalEnergies.
Last year the king — dictator, actually — tried to shut down a bunch of offshore wind farms that were already being built. And now he’s paying to kill wind farms before they get started. He’s still trying to get even with the people who, more than a decade ago, refused to block construction of an offshore wind farm that he thought would spoil the view from a golf course he was building in Scotland.
“This guy neutered the EPA,” I said. “He started a billion-dollar-a-day pointless war with Iran that’s ruining the economy. He refuses to see that boosting renewable energy alternatives is the best way to avoid wars fought over fossil fuels. Why should it surprise you that he’s using taxpayer money to poison the planet?
“I ain’t surprised, I’m scared,” Swamp Rabbit said. “That’s why I’m going to that No Kings protest on Saturday. It’ll feel good to be around peeps who ain’t MAGA.”
Footnote: Trump is a special case, but there’s nothing new about rightwing opposition to renewable energy. Ronald Reagan took down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter put on the White House. George H.W. Bush said he differed with Reagan and hired the pro-environment William Reilly to head the EPA, but Reilly was blocked by Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, an arrogant reactionary bully — Trump with brains — who was pro-oil all the way. Most of this is explained well in The White House Effect, a documentary now on Netflix.
My juicehead neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were debating the merits of the Academy Award-winning One Battle After Another.
“It’s what they call a tour de force,” I said. “A satire, a black comedy, a political statement, an action movie, a love story. One of those rare movies — serious and funny as hell at the same time.”
Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “I guess so, but them machine guns gave me a headache. and I couldn’t figure out what time it was — the 2000s and then the present, I think, but most of that revolutionary bank-robbing stuff happened in the 1970s and ’80s. There weren’t no Weathermen left in the aughts.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s called poetic license — fudging the facts to make your story more compelling without making it less truthful. The sort of storytelling that’s as old as the works of Homer, whoever he was.”
I told him that burned-out rebels like Bob Ferguson, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, and cartoonish villains like Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw, the Sean Penn character, will keep facing off so long as satiric movies are being made about democracy under threat from authoritarian forces.
“That’s why Paul Thomas Anderson called his movie One Battle After Another,” I said. “The same pitched battles get fought every generation. The bathrobe DiCaprio wore is like the bathrobe Jeff Bridges wore in The Big Lebowski.”
Swamp Rabbit zipped open a beer. “Well, ain’t you the wise one — a movie critic and historian both. I watch movies to be entertained, Odd Man. I don’t need no history lesson.”
He knew I liked One Battle After Another, so he was playing devil’s advocate by implying that it’s just an exercise in leftwing revisionist history. “You’re not fooling me,” I said. “You liked it, too.”
I knew he liked the Black outlaw played by Teyana Taylor. And the scene with Jonny Greenwood’s atonal piano music playing while DiCaprio is on the run. And the car chase. And the outlaws using a secret code that starts with “Green Acres, the Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction” — a reference to Gil Scott-Heron’s rap poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” from 1970.
The movie is very loosely based on Vineland, a Thomas Pynchon novel, but Scott-Heron’s rap is a much larger influence. Anderson, like Scott-Heron, has a knack for using the flotsam of American pop culture to shed light on contemporary societal trends.
“Most peeps are too young to recognize all that old stuff that Scott-Heron mentions,” Swamp Rabbit said.
“No big deal,” I replied. “The flotsam these days looks pretty much like it did then. Only the names change.”
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was beside himself with anger. “The hog monster is spending a billion dollars a day blowin’ up Iran. He called the war a little excursion. He says he’ll feel it in his bones when it’s time to call off the dogs.”
“He’ll feel it in his bone spurs,” I said.
But Swamp Rabbit was in no mood for jokes. He was ranting. Imagine if just a fraction of that war money was used in this country to improve health care or childcare or affordable housing or public schools. Instead, we have a president ignoring Congress and starting a war for reasons he can’t even explain. It wasn’t regime change, the mullahs are entrenched over there. The “imminent” threat of a nuclear attack by Iran was bogus, too.
“It’s like 1980,” my besotted neighbor said. “Iran had them American hostages and everybody over here was singing ‘Bomb Iran’ to the tune of ‘Barbara Ann.’ Except there ain’t no hostages this time. Just that creep Netanyahu counting on Trump to be stupid enough to help Israel bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.”
I told him there’s more to it than that — there are the Epstein files. The Trump gang has run out of excuses. At this point, even some of Trump’s congressional stooges are calling for release of the unredacted files that might prove his complicity in Epstein’s crimes. Trump is a clown, but he’s hip to what dictators often do when they’re on shaky ground — they start a war and say it’s our patriotic duty to join in and drop everything else.
“Yeah, but that dog don’t hunt this time,” Swamp Rabbit said. “The peeps can deal with being ruled by a dictator, but they ain’t gonna stand for higher gas prices, not for long. Trump’s got them hardcore MAGA dummies on board with him, but nobody else.”
I shook my head, disagreeing. “He bought the billionaires and control of the corporate media. They’ve already neutered CBS, Washington Post and lots of other legitimate news sources.”
“He’ll ease up with the bombing soon, Odd Man. Even Trump don’t want to start no world war.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” I said. “Not if it comes down to starting a world war or being kicked out of office and prosecuted.”
Andy Borowitz’s headline was “Nation’s dogs celebrate Noem’s firing,” No doubt people all over the country who were terrorized by Trump’s foremost looney are also celebrating.
“What you mean by foremost?” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said. “You saying she’s more despicable than them other crooks and loonies in Trump’s gang?”
I told him there are other standouts. Stephen Miller talks like Heinrich Himmler. Pete Hegseth struts like Benito Mussolini. Pam Bondi glares like Irma Grese, the ultimate mean girl. But Kristi Noem, the vacant-eyed, balloon-lipped ex-chief of Homeland Security, is arguably a special case, almost as vile as the guy who hired and fired her.
“You mean because she killed her dog?” Swamp Rabbit said.
“Because she said the murdered protestors in Minneapolis were domestic terrorists. And because of the role she played in deporting hundreds of Venezuelan detainees to be confined and probably tortured in El Salvador, at a prison that’s run like a concentration camp.”
I confessed to being shocked last year by the dog slayer’s photo op at the prison — shots of her wearing a designer bill cap and a $50,000 Rolex, preening in front of a cell block jammed with nearly naked male prisoners who hadn’t even been formally charged with any crimes. The video is eerily reminiscent of the film made when Himmler visited a concentration camp in Belarus in 1941.
“Firing is too good for her,” I said. “She belongs in that El Salvador jail.”
Swamp Rabbit choked on his beer. “You don’t mean that, Odd Man. Them inmates are packed in there like sardines. They’d eat her alive.”
“You’re right,” I conceded after a moment’s reflection. “She belongs in Gitmo. There aren’t nearly as many inmates there.”
Footnote: Noem is no more likely to face criminal charges than the other criminals in the Trump gang. Trump demoted her not because she’s cruel and incompetent, but rather because she told a congressional committee that he authorized her to spend $220 million on her self-promotional anti-immigrant ads.
The movie The Social Network (2010) was a portrait of the gifted tech geek Mark Zuckerberg as he embarked on the road to fame and fortune by founding Facebook, now called Meta. Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (2025) traces Zuckerberg’s progress down that road, which led to greed, grandiosity, and subservience to authoritarians, including the most corrupt president in U.S. history.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit, drunk at noon, laughed at my remarks. “Who did she expect Zuckerberg to serve, Bernie Sanders? What planet is she from?”
I told him that Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand native who worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017 promoting projects meant to make the company a force for free speech and other democratic ideals. She schmoozed diplomats and dictators all over the world and apparently assumed Zuckerberg and his lieutenants — Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and so on — were on the same ideological page with her. It took her a while to realize they were overgrown brats, in love with power and expensive toys, to hell with the peons.
“If you say so,” Swamp Rabbit said. “But she must have known right away that Zuck and his cronies were money-grubbin’ rightwing phonies. Nothing they did should have surprised her.”
What’s surprising, I told him, is that Meta called Careless People “a mix of old claims and false accusations,” but has yet to sue Wynn-Williams for libel. Among many other things, her book accused the company of being partly responsible for the genocide in Myanmar, of bending over backwards to appease China’s oppressive regime, and of knowingly spreading misinformation that arguably helped bring Donald Trump to power twice.
“Last year the Meta lawyers got a gag order imposed that blocks the author from badmouthing the company,” I said. “But they didn’t try to block publication of the book, which almost instantly became a New York Times bestseller. If what she wrote was libelous, they would have sued her for a zillion dollars by now.”
I noted that Careless People does a good job of documenting Zuckerberg’s descent into total corruption. The Zuck fell out with Trump and had him kicked off Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. But then he groveled enough to be invited to Trump’s second inauguration, where he took his place with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the pantheon of billionaire pigs.
Swamp Rabbit zipped open a beer. “Listen to you, all nasty and scornful. Stop complaining about shit you can’t control. Have a drink, it’ll put you in a better mood.”
“I’m in a great mood,” I said. “I got two likes on Facebook today.”
Footnote: The book’s title was inspired by that great quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Another: Lots of amusing anecdotes in the book, including the one about Sandberg using a young female assistant to buy $13,000 worth of lingerie for the two of them. Headline suggestion: “Underling buys underwear for controlling COO.”
“Are they really gonna put that stuff back?” Swamp Rabbit said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
He’s right, the battle isn’t over, but censorship foes will appreciate the literary allusion made by U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe this week when she ordered reinstallation of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia:
“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.”
The exhibit features educational signage and video honoring nine enslaved people George Washington kept at his house at the site, which is in Independence National Historical Park, a few miles from my swampy home. Workers removed the exhibit last month in a move that’s part of the Trump administration’s campaign to erase “anti-American ideology” at National Park Service locations around the country.
“That’s funny,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t nothin’ more anti-American than Donald Trump.”
Footnote: The National Park Service, a bureau of the Department of the Interior, has appealed the judge’s ruling, which will remain in effect pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the City of Philadelphia that challenges the removal of the exhibit.
Update: It seems Swamp Rabbit’s question has been answered. Today, after noticing the Trump administration’s “failure to comply” with her Monday ruling, Rufe imposed a deadline. Her new order states that the Park Service must reinstall the slavery exhibit by 5 pm Friday.
My annoying neighbor Swamp Rabbit was addressing my tendency to be late with everything. “Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, Odd Man. Today is just another day.”
I told him I was working yesterday and didn’t have time to think about love, though I did wonder why so many women were wearing red.
“It takes time to make a playlist of good love songs,” I said. “Not that you would know. Last year all you could think of were regret songs. Love-gone-wrong songs. I rejected them.”
He scoffed at my list for this year. “The Zombies song is a valentine, and Van Morrison, but most of the others ain’t. Captain Beefheart, James Brown, that creepy Randy Newman number. That’s a lust song, not a love song.”
“What’s the difference?” I said.
“Ha. The fact that you’re askin’ that question helps explain your lousy track record with women.”
Odd Man Out 