Why it’s so easy to vote against Republicans

Posted on November 7, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer, Victor Cortez, knocked on his door on Election Day, checking to make sure he’s still on the straight and narrow. After they conferred, Victor drove him to the polling place on Christian Street — “Gotta do my civic duty,” Swamp Rabbit said — and I went along for the ride.

“It’s been a long while since I done this,” he said when we got to the voting booths. “I ain’t sure which buttons to push.”

A cloud of dust was stirred up as I patted him on the back. “You’ll figure it out. Just don’t let anyone push the buttons for you.”

Voting this year was easy for me. In the distant past, I sometimes felt guilty for voting the straight Democratic ticket. Surely I’d overlooked some Republican candidate who wasn’t an apologist for bigots and corporate thieves and despoilers of the environment. But then Donald Trump’s era dawned, and it soon became clear that Republican officeholders, all of them, were in lockstep with him.

And they still are. Trump has proudly abused the powers of the presidency. He has usurped the powers of Congress. He was convicted on 34 counts of business fraud. He was convicted of sexual abuse. He said he was a victim of voter fraud, an obvious lie, and he helped incite a riot at the Capitol over this issue on January 6, 2021.

But Republican officeholders don’t care. They keep on goosestepping, either because they believe in Trump’s fascist agenda or because they’re afraid crossing him will end their political careers.

“Think about it,” I told my swampy friend after we voted. “Congressional Republicans tried to keep Trump in office after Biden won in 2020. During the certification process, more than 140 of them voted to overturn the election results. That makes them traitors. They don’t deserve to be in office, and neither do the other Republicans who condone what they did.”

“So what do we do, arrest them for bowing down to the Mango Mussolini? You don’t make no sense, Odd Man.”

“We vote them out of office next time around — if we still have a democracy, that is. We’ve got a long way to go, but this year’s elections might be a good start.”

Footnote: About the Randy Newman song — it was released in the Nixon era, but it could easily be about our current Republican president. I’d like to hear a song about why so many working people vote for pathological liars, knowing they’ll regret it later.

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A movie about conscience. (No wonder it wasn’t a hit.)

Posted on November 5, 2025 by oddmanout215

OK, I’m busted. Last week I implied that the movies shown on Netflix are invariably mediocre, but within days The Forgiven (2021) proved me wrong. It takes place at a luxury residence on the fringe of the Sahara Desert — the movie was shot on location — where a bunch of debauched Westerners are throwing a wild party. Fiennes plays David Henninger, a cynical alcoholic who accidentally hits and kills an impoverished Moroccan boy while driving drunk to the party with his long-suffering wife Jo, played by Jessica Chastain.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit listened and said, “You shoulda wrote that the Netflix original movies are always mediocre. The Forgiven came out years ago in theaters. It wasn’t produced by the Netflix peeps. Where you been?”

Anyway, the plot hinges on whether Henninger, a privileged character, will face consequences for killing the boy. and things begin to look bad for him when the boy’s father turns up at the party house seeking justice. What follows is Henninger passing through various stages of denial on his way to concluding he’s unworthy of forgiveness for the hit-and-run and, in general, for being a lifelong bad guy.

“I saw the movie,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Fiennes plays a selfish creep who’s sick of himself. He’s good at that. The other peeps at the party are creeps too but everybody’s funny in a snarky way, don’t you think?”

Nobody’s laughing when Henninger is pressured by the angry, grieving father to journey deep into the desert for the boy’s funeral. It’s clear early on that he’s a stand-in for rich people everywhere who exploit the poor and ignore their misery. But he becomes a vehicle for the film’s guilt/redemption theme. He grows a conscience.

Swamp Rabbit cackled. “Take a look at the scumbags who run this country. Ain’t no such thing as conscience. No wonder that movie wasn’t a hit.”

I told him that only psychopaths don’t have a conscience. That guilt/redemption is a universal, timeless theme. That The Forgiven is clunky in spots but substantial, a smart story about the mystery of human nature. The sort of story Graham Greene or Paul Bowles might write. Or Albert Camus, maybe.

“Yeah, but them guys are dead,” Swamp Rabbit said. “The only mystery is how a pale, beautiful redhead like Jessica Chastain could hang out in the desert sun for so long without getting burned to a crisp. She must have slathered on a gallon of sunblock.”

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I do believe in spooks!

Posted on October 31, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was concerned about my mental health. He had decorated the front of his shack with jack-‘o-lanterns and plastic tombstones and so on, and he was wondering why my shack looked so dark and uninviting.

“You need some skeletons and bats and maybe a curbside Freddy Krueger,” he said. “Here, have some of these.”

We were standing on his sagging front porch. He reached into a plastic cauldron and tried to present me with a handful of candy corn.

“Get that shit away from me,” I said. “I’ve got my own way of celebrating holidays. You should check out my annual Halloween playlist. No repeats from last year.”

I showed him the list of songs on my phone and he scowled. “Halloween is supposed to be fun. These songs are too scary. Most of them ain’t even Halloween songs. The peeps will think you really believe in spooks and monsters.”

“I’m like the Cowardly Lion,” I said. “I do believe in spooks. Monsters, too. How can you live in this world and not believe in spooks?”

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Netflix stars upstaged by sexy ‘superyacht’

Posted on October 29, 2025 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were discussing the steady stream of mediocre movies that Netflix cranks out for subscribers.

“I saw a new one last week called The Woman in Cabin 10,” I said. “It’s about an ace reporter who solves a murder mystery involving a bunch of billionaires sailing on a luxury yacht to some charity event.”

Swamp Rabbit brightened up. “A whodunit, right? Is it any good?”

I told him that Keira Knightley, as the annoying reporter, should have been thrown overboard. That the storyline, which depends on the old doppelganger gimmick, was too predictable.

Swamp Rabbit frowned when I said “predictable.” He told me there are only six or seven basic story categories and they all use formulas that writers created thousands of years ago. He asked why I kept watching the movie if I didn’t like it.

“It was late and I was too tired to write or read,” I explained. That’s what Netflix movies are for. They lull you to sleep when you don’t have the energy for anything else. The more predictable the story, the more likely you are to doze off.

“The peeps like predictable,” he said. “Human nature don’t change, so why should stories?”

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “The most interesting character in The Woman in Cabin 10 is the yacht.”

It’s true; the real star is the 274-foot-long Savannah, shiny and streamlined, with video walls, an underwater viewing area and cabins that look more like staterooms. This “superyacht” reportedly was built for about $150M and costs $1M a week to rent.

Big money, but well worth it if you know your viewers want to fantasize about the lifestyles of the rich and fatuous. As Swamp Rabbit noted, human nature doesn’t change. The Woman in Cabin 10 would have been popular in the Great Depression, when audiences preferred movies where the actors wore tuxedoes and evening gowns and drank martinis and flounced around in Art Deco penthouses that shimmered in heavenly light.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with fantasizing,” Swamp Rabbit said. “”Real life is way overrated, especially if you’re poor.”

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No kings, no dictators, no bike pump

Posted on October 21, 2025 by oddmanout215

I had to work Sunday but figured there would be time to catch the tail end of the No Kings march. I finished work, drove home to South Philadelphia and jumped on my bicycle. But my back tire went flat as I was riding to Independence Mall, so I didn’t get to rub shoulders with the inflatable chicken woman and thousands of others who turned out to protest the ongoing misdeeds of the orange blob who would be king.

“I couldn’t find a gas station with a working air pump,” I told my neighbor Swamp Rabbit when he asked why I didn’t get the tire re-inflated.

“Don’t blame them gas stations,” he said. “It ain’t their fault you’re too dumb to carry an air pump.”

The Philly march was one of more than 2,700 No Kings demonstrations that took place on the same day all over the country to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to dispense with the norms — not to mention the laws — of America’s 249-year-old democracy. A bunch of local politicians were among the protesters, as well as ex-Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who was in town to perform at Met Philadelphia and was happy to pose for selfies with some of the protestors who recognized him.

Byrne brought his bike (!) and marched with it. Swamp Rabbit was amused to learn this and said, “I bet he had plenty of air in his tires.”

It seems a good time was had by all, which drove home the main point of the marches. Sane people — especially sane city people — are fed up with the evil buffoon in the White House and his goons, who will end all protests, along with free and fair elections, if they can get away with it. But this isn’t Germany in the 1930s, right?

“We’ll see about that,” Swamp Rabbit said.

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Why Trump’s favorite mean girl loves SNL

Posted on October 16, 2025 by oddmanout215

Two weeks ago, I noted that most satirists don’t seem to be up to the task of effectively ridiculing our criminal president and his eager accomplices.

A case in point: the sketch on last week’s Saturday Night Live in which cast member Amy Poehler spoofs the corrosive Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the same sketch, Tina Fey plays Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Afterwards, instead of firing back at SNL for lampooning her, the real-life Bondi posted a photo of Poehler and Fey taken from the sketch and the message “Loving Any Poehler!”

Bondi felt flattered by the sketch.

SNL’s audience deserves better than a cute little skit that makes light of Bondi’s evasions and lies regarding Trump’s undermining of the Department of Justice’s prosecutorial independence. Cute doesn’t cut it if you’re supposedly in the business of satirizing public figures whose conduct is — no exaggeration — hastening the decline of democracy in America.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit disagreed with me. “What you want SNL to do? Joke about where Bondi’s hiding Jeffrey Epstein’s client list? Re-enact Noem’s execution of her dog? If shit’s too nasty, it ain’t funny.”

“Ever read Swift’s A Modest Proposal?” I said. “Like I said last time, the best satire is nasty and funny. Stephen Colbert would have skewered those Republican bimbos.”

“Yeah, but look what’s happening to Colbert,” my mangy neighbor said. “SNL would rather be cute than get kicked off TV, don’t ya think?”

Footnote: Credit Poehler as Bondi with at least one funny line: “I’m not even going to dignify that question with a lie.”

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Jane Goodall, scientist and humanist

Posted on October 13, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was asking if I’d listened to the year-old podcast featuring environmentalist Jane Goodall that was aired again on public radio not long after she died on Oct. 1 at age 91.

Of course I’d listened. Goodall helped overturn conventional wisdom regarding how humans should treat the rest of the animal kingdom and nature in general. Early on she conducted breakthrough field research about the behavior of chimpanzees. Throughout her career she used humor and empathy to spark support for animal and human rights, and for sustainability, a concept that was still fairly obscure when she first made a name for herself.

“Well, how about that,” Swamp Rabbit said. “It’s about time you wrote about a good person instead of Donald Trump and Pam Bondi and them other degenerates.”

In the podcast Goodall describes what happened after her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, talked her into pursuing a PhD at Cambridge in the 1960s:

I was told [by instructors] I’d done everything wrong. You shouldn’t have given the chimpanzees names. They’re just animals. They should have numbers. And you can’t talk about their personality, their mind, or their emotion. Those are characteristics unique to us. Nor must you have empathy, because to be a good scientist, you must be coldly objective. So, fortunately, I had this wonderful teacher when I was a child, who taught me that in this respect, those professors were totally, completely different. Talking rubbish. And, um, that teacher was my dog, Rusty. You, you can’t have an animal and not know that of course we’re not the only beings on this planet with personalities, minds, and emotions.

Not your standard stuffy academic. She got her PhD in ethology and went on with her life’s work. People everywhere liked her because she was a down-to-earth believer in the power of good. A humanist, in other words.

“You sure you want to call her a humanist?” Swamp Rabbit said. “I ain’t heard that word in a long time.”

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Satire is no match for a mad king and his minions

Posted on October 6, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit and I were debating the usefulness of satire in a country whose democratic traditions are being subverted by authoritarian forces. Will poking fun at those forces help? Can satirists wake sane Americans to the fact that the norms they took for granted – rule of law, free speech, free and fair elections, peaceful transfer of power, etc. – are being flushed away by a deranged president and his fanatically loyal underlings?

Swamp Rabbit rolled his bloodshot eyes. “What you mean by waking and poking fun? Fascists got no sense of humor. They don’t take kindly to being poked.”

“I’m talking about waking the public, not the fascists,” I said. “Satire only works if it’s caustic and ridiculous enough to spark a backlash against the powers that be. It has to be absurd but fundamentally true. It doesn’t just poke, it punctures. I’m working on a good satire right now.”

I told him I was writing a skit that opens with a secretary of defense – secretary of war, he calls himself – telling hundreds of generals and admirals at a military base that they’d better get with the program. No more “beardos” or queers. No “fat generals or admirals.” No more foreign wars, just wars against American cities. The secretary tries to talk tough like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove — a great satire — but he seems to be nothing more than a pompous blowhard in a sharp suit. Then the draft-dodging president appears – his nickname is Bone Spurs – and promises to bring back battleships and use American cities as “training grounds” for the military. Afterwards the generals and admirals file out and one of them says, “I can’t believe I had to travel six thousand miles to hear that bullshit.”

At first Swamp Rabbit didn’t critique my skit idea. “I know it sounds farfetched,” I said, “but do you think it might get people fired up enough to start a backlash?”

He frowned and opened a cold beer. “The peeps will think it sounds like that skit about Pete Hegseth on Saturday Night Live last week. It didn’t fire them up. They laughed a little and then they went to sleep.”

I must have looked disappointed. He said, “Face it, Odd Man. Satire ain’t worth shit these days. Reality will upstage it every time.”

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An escalator is [not] just an escalator

Posted on September 25, 2025 by oddmanout215

Donald and Melania Trump were standing on the “up” escalator, which had stopped moving as soon as they stepped on to it. Pretty funny, but Trump wasn’t laughing.

“He’s one of them sociopaths,” said my neighbor Swamp Rabbit as we watched the video. “He don’t laugh at nothing except when somebody he don’t like breaks their neck or something.”

The escalator malfunction was at the United Nations, not long before Trump started to make a Hitlerian speech and found his teleprompter wasn’t working. Later, predictably, he insisted the escalator and teleprompter failed because of “sabotage” and ordered an “immediate investigation.”

“This was symbolism, not sabotage,” I said. “The gods are trying to tell Trump he’s just an evil clown who won power because Americans were too angry and confused to understand that electing him for a second time might be the kiss of death for the American experiment.”

Swamp Rabbit shook his head and reached for his beer. “Okay, but what you mean by symbolism? Sometimes an escalator is just an escalator.”

I sighed. “An escalator is a symbol. Remember when Trump rode the escalator at Trump Tower with Melania ten years ago? It was the gods signaling that the time was right for him to become a major threat to civilization. But this time the gods used an escalator to tell him he’s an irredeemable jackass, the world has had enough. The escalators are like bookends.”

Swamp Rabbit scowled. “You must have been one of them English majors. Symbols don’t mean nothing. What you’re saying is just wishful thinking.”

“You’re probably right,” I replied. “But it doesn’t hurt to make a wish.”

Footnote: The escalator and teleprompter malfunctions turned out the be the fault of Trump’s lackeys. Predictably.

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Kimmel is returning, but on how many stations?

Posted on September 23, 2025 by oddmanout215

So Disney boss Bob Iger gave in to public opinion. He caved. He apparently told ABC to put comedian Jimmy Kimmel back on TV a few days after he axed him for speaking his mind about the Charlie Kirk murder. Even though Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s FCC lapdog, threatened to take action against Disney and the other corporate entities if they didn’t muzzle Kimmel.

“I guess you mean Sinclair and Nexstar and them other corporates that own most of the stations that air Kimmel’s show,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said. “I never even heard of them before this. Can Disney really make them put Kimmel back on the air?”

l shrugged. All I know is what I wrote last time — a very small group of weasels are in charge of the big decisions regarding what us commoners can view or read in mainstream media, and they care about money, not free speech.

One thing’s for sure: Disney is an octopus with tentacles everywhere. Money was on Iger’s mind when he reconsidered axing Kimmel. He must have realized that the backlash from celebrities and the general public was hurting Disney’s bottom line worse than defying Carr would.

But the Trump-loving weasels at Sinclair are saying they still intend to keep Kimmel off their stations, probably because they think most of their viewers are Trumpers and won’t object. And what about Nexstar? It needs an OK from the FCC before it can go ahead with a merger that would make it the king of TV station owners. Is Nexstar counting on Iger to smooth things over with Carr? Meanwhile, an even bigger problem with the FCC looms for the Disney octopus, this one involving ESPN, one of its main tentacles.

Another thing that’s for sure: We’re not likely to learn the inside story about any of these attempted power grabs from Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post or other corporate media entities.

Swamp Rabbit zipped open a beer and said he’s decided to stop being pissed off. “Ain’t none of us can do a damn thing about them weasels, we’re out of the loop. Might as well just watch TV all the time.”

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