No method, just madness

Posted on March 30, 2025 by oddmanout215

From Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: Colonel Kurtz: “Are my methods unsound?” Captain Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

I was listing for my neighbor Swamp Rabbit some of the steps Donald Trump took to undermine the law in the first weeks of his second term — illegal arrest and deportation of foreign-born residents, a crackdown on media outlets that question his judgment and motives, ongoing defiance of the courts system, an all-out attack on environmental protection laws …

“Trump wants to fix it so there ain’t nothin’ to stop him from being a dictator,” Swamp Rabbit said. “There’s a method to his madness, I guess.”

But my neighbor was giving our first criminal president too much credit. As the New Republic‘s Ross Rosenfeld recently suggested, there’s no method — there’s only madness, and a desire to wreck anything that promotes the common good. Trump and his minions, led by Elon Musk, have already dismissed thousands of federal workers, shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, raided the Treasury Department, made enemies of countries that were our allies, explored new ways to eliminate Social Security, and much more.

“I don’t care about that stuff,” Swamp Rabbit joked. “How about the price of eggs?”

Eggs are the least of our problems, I told him. Trump’s goal is to grab all the loot in the country for himself and his billionaire cronies, and smash everything else in order to do so. Chaos is his ally. His minions lay off nuclear weapons workers. They impose tariffs that could blow up the economy. They cut health services as measles is spreading.

I played for my neighbor the Laurie Anderson recording about a lunatic airline pilot instructing his passengers to prepare for a crash landing: Put your head on your knees… Put your head in your hands… Put your hands on your hips… Ha-ha… We are going down… We are all going down together.

Footnote: Robert Reich is growing impatient regarding people who are in a position to fight Trump. A recent post of his was headlined: “Where the HELL are the Democrats?” He should follow it with “Where the HELL are the media?”

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Yo Birds — don’t help normalize the nut job

Posted on March 17, 2025 by oddmanout215

From a recent story in Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Eagles will visit the White House on April 28 to celebrate their Super Bowl victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed to reporters Tuesday.

I filled in the background details for my friend Swamp Rabbit. Back in 2018, Donald Trump “uninvited” the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles to a White House ceremony that had been scheduled in their honor. Trump, at the time, was publicly badmouthing Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who had protested against systemic racism. His cancelation of the Eagles’ visit was his childish way of retaliating against players who supported the protestors.

“Maybe you can explain this to me, Swamp Rabbit,” I said. “Most of the players in the NFL are Black. Why would Black players — or white players, for that matter — appear at an event hosted by the most racist U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson?”

“Maybe they think it’s an honor to be invited to the White House, it don’t matter who’s president,” he replied. “It’s easy to call someone a racist but where’s the smoking gun?”

I reminded him that Trump was sued by the DOJ for discrimination against Black renters. He took out an ad calling for the return of the death penalty when the “Central Park Five” were falsely accused of rape. He said “I don’t want Black guys counting my money” when he was a casino owner. He said that “both sides” were to blame for the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, VA. He complained that America has become a destination for immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa. He said Mexican immigrants were rapists and murderers.

“I could show you a hundred more smoking guns,” I said. “The Eagles should snub Trump, if only to bond with the players who protested racism.”

He looked at me as if I were a Martian. “There are bonds and there are bonds. Trump is a multimillionaire and so are some of them Eagles. The millionaires club is a much stronger bond than skin color, in case you ain’t noticed.”

True enough, I conceded, but that doesn’t excuse the footballers, black or white, who are helping normalize America’s ongoing transition from democracy to authoritarian rule. Trump has installed hacks and loonies in top government posts. He’s appointed an unelected, Nazi-sympathizing billionaire to dismantle federal agencies. He’s sided with dictators, betrayed foreign allies, pardoned rightwing terrorists and taken steps to muzzle political opponents and shred the social safety net.

“There is no guaranteed safety for anyone in a dictatorship,” I said, “even for members of the millionaires club.”

Footnote: One thing for sure is that the Democratic Party won’t save us, not so long as it’s led by old geldings like Chuck Schumer.

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‘Ukraine’ rhymes with ‘Czechoslovakia’

Posted on February 22, 2025 by oddmanout215

Here’s U.S. Vice President JD Vance in Munich, scolding German leaders who say they won’t work with Alternative for Germany (AfD), a neo-Nazi party that has gained a lot of followers because of immigration and a downturn in the German economy:

To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.

“Yes, God forbid,” I said. “How dare those stuffy old German moderates! Why will they not open the door to a party that emulates Hitler’s Nazi Party, which used the democratic system in the 1930s to seize power and start a war that resulted in more than 50 million deaths? It’s an outrage. What they need is an alternative viewpoint.”

Swamp Rabbit was drinking Old Grand-Dad and feeling feisty. “This ain’t no time for irony, Odd Man. That backstabbing swine Vance wants to make history with Donald Trump and President Musk. The speech he made was his way of waving bye-bye to the NATO gang that kept Soviet Russia from gobbling up the rest of Europe after World War II.”

Bye-bye indeed. The new U.S. strategy accommodates Russia’s desire to take back its old empire and Trump’s eagerness to appease his soulmate Vladimir Putin. It looks like his first act of appeasement will be the sellout of U.S-allied Ukraine, which would be eerily reminiscent of the Anglo-French sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938.

Swamp Rabbit said, “Okay, this is where you get to use that famous Mark Twain quote that Twain probably never said — ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.'”

“That’s a good one,” I agreed. “You can’t hear it at first, but Ukraine definitely rhymes with Czechoslovakia.”

Footnote: Vance’s own words, in 2016: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

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What is this thing called love?

Posted on February 14, 2025 by oddmanout215

My friend Swamp Rabbit took a look my Valentine’s Day playlist — almost the same list I used a few years ago — and began naming all the songs I should have included: “Little Walter’s ‘Just Your Fool,’ the Kinks’ ‘Who’ll Be the Next in Line,’ Bonnie Raitt’s ‘You’ve Been in Love Too Long.’ Otis Redding’s ‘Pain in My Heart,’ Dionne Warwick’s ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,’ the Temptation’s –“

“Wait a minute,” I said. Those aren’t love songs, they’re regret songs. Jump off a bridge songs. I’ve learned that nobody wants to hear about love gone wrong on Valentine’s Day. Don’t be so cynical.”

“I ain’t cynical, I’m realistic. You got your flowers, you got your weeds. You got your love songs, you got your regret songs.”

I scowled at him and stepped away. “The one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. Your problem is you don’t really believe in love.”

He went quiet for a moment. “I believe there’s such a thing as love. There’s such a thing as narcotics, too. That don’t mean I have to get strung out on ’em.”

“If you say so,” I said. “But Happy Valentine’s Day anyway.”

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Ruling class loves ‘subversive’ Kendrick Lamar

Posted on February 12, 2025 by oddmanout215

The reviews came gushing in on Monday: “…the Most Hip-Hop Halftime Show in Super Bowl History” (Billboard); “Kendrick Lamar’s performance was as Black and subversive as all get-out” (Washington Post); “The best word to describe the rapper’s halftime show is ‘existential.’” (New Yorker).

Kendrick Lamarr, the subject of the reviews, performed symbolic set pieces with a poorly choreographed army of red, white and blue-clad Black dancers on Sunday at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. The Grammy Award winner rapped a mile a minute through a sound system that failed to make his edgy lyrics understandable to most of the huge audience watching from home. (Why no subtitles?)

My friend Swamp Rabbit shrugged as I complained. “Most of them critics liked it,” he said. “They say he was speaking truth to power, and so on.”

I had to laugh. “Truth to power? Power loves this guy. He’s making millions for the entertainment industry.”

I told my feral friend that the best thing to be said for the critics is that they were on deadline and having panicky thoughts:

Oh shit, what am I to make of this mess? I’d better write superlatives to prove I’m au courant. Better describe Lamar’s 13-minute opus as subversive, though it’s not clear what’s being subverted when a rich Black pop star performs for a mostly White crowd that paid thousands of dollars a pop to witness a bloated, anticlimactic spectacle (Super Bowl) that reaffirms the system that the pop star says he loathes...

“You’re just a cynical old white guy,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Maybe Kendrick is a pop star and a prophet preaching against racism. It ain’t no accident he gave props to Gil Scott-Heron, the guy who wrote ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.'”

I threw one of his empty beer cans at him. “Funny you should mention Gil Scott-Heron. He wrote that piece more than fifty years ago but it still sounds wittier and more incisive than stuff like ‘Not Like Us.’ I looked up the lyrics to that piece. Lamar seems more interested in dissing his pop star rival Drake than agitating for the revolution.”

“I don’t really know what revolution means. Odd Man. I guess we’ll find out when it happens.”

“It is happening, you mangy fool. The problem is it’s being led by a small gang of ultra-rich white supremacists who control all three branches of government. And it is not being televised.”

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We want you, Big Brother!

Posted on February 4, 2025 by oddmanout215

I opened my laptop and alerted my neighbor Swamp Rabbit to a recent news story:

The Department of Justice scrubbed all information about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot from its website over the weekend, online archives show, continuing the Trump administration’s apparent campaign to reshape government web content in the new president’s image. The removal of the content comes just days after President Donald Trump pardoned anyone for “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

“It didn’t take long for Donald Trump and his dirt bags to ditch the rule of law and erase history, did it? ” I said. “They remind me of a quote from 1984. Do you have a copy? I used to have an old Signet paperback, but it fell apart.”

Swamp Rabbit stroked his wiry goatee. “I have a copy of David Bowie’s ‘1984’ and Spirit’s ‘1984,’ and that album by Van Halen. I have ‘1999’ by Prince.”

“I’m not talking about music, you goofball. I mean the George Orwell novel that inspired the songs. But never mind — I just remembered the entire novel is on the Internet now.”

I went to Google and found the quotation in Part 1, Chapter 7: The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

“Ain’t it ironic?” Swamp Rabbit said, noting that we can go online and read a cautionary tale that describes a fictional dictator (Big Brother) destroying the historical record as a means of wiping out information that might threaten his control, but we can’t do anything about a degenerate president who’s doing the same thing in the real world.

“It’s worse than that,” I said. “The people who voted for Trump continue to think he can do no wrong. The media has more or less normalized his tyranny. Opponents of the felon-in-chief are too discouraged to mount serious opposition to the coup that’s being orchestrated for him by Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire shadow president.”

“The peeps might hit back if Trump goes through with them tariffs,” my deadbeat buddy said. “Tyranny they can put up with, but not another major jump in the price of eggs, not to mention cars.”

“I doubt it,” I replied. “Trump will just order his minions to rewrite the history of his recent failures. He’ll blame transexual immigrants and woke bias at PBS. The MAGA crowd will love it.”

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The Bizarro World presidency

Posted on January 24, 2025 by oddmanout215

I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that Bizarro World is defined in Wikipedia as “a fictional planet appearing in American comic books where “everything is ‘reversed’ in some way, with heroes being villains and vice versa, and beauty being hated while ugliness is embraced.”

“Sounds like a place where Donald Trump is in charge,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Did them comic book writers have him in mind when they invented it?”

The Bizarro World concept caught on in popular culture in the 1960s, I told him. Trump has spent his whole life learning to navigate that world, a trick that involves subverting the logical order of things and convincing people that what’s good is bad, what’s right is wrong and what’s true is false. It’s a world where everything is broken.

“Trump became the president of Bizarro World eight years ago,” I noted. “The people who voted for him were voting to become citizens of that world. They have no intention of returning to our world, no matter how deranged Trump becomes. The problem is that Trump, now that he’s back in office, is trying again to impose the Bizarro World on the rest of us.”

Swamp Rabbit suggested that the media should use a Bizarro World dictionary to keep up with Trump’s reversals. An excellent idea, I told him. This might help them report the news more clearly. My mangy neighbor quickly came up with some terms Trump uses and what those terms mean in Bizarro World:

Rigged election — an election in which votes were fairly and accurately counted. Oath of office — a big lie told while holding one’s hand on the Bible. Patriot — insurrectionist lout. Enemy of the people — anyone who calls attention to Trump’s daily lies. Totally under control — totally out of control, like the coronavirus that Trump pretended was disappearing. Murderers and rapists — migrants who have committed no crimes of violence.

“I ain’t hardly got started yet,” Swamp Rabbit said. “It’s gonna be a really big book.”

Footnote: For a sitcom version of Bizarro World, try the “Seinfeld” episode in which the show’s main characters, all of them neurotic twits, interact with “normal” doubles of themselves.

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She would not ‘obey in advance’

Posted on January 10, 2025 by oddmanout215

“What’s with the art?” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit asked.

I told him it was a draft of a cartoon by Ann Telnaes, who resigned from the Washington Post last week after her editor refused to publish the cartoon, which depicts Amazon and Post owner Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AI CEO Sam Altman, LA Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong and Walt Disney Company mascot Mickey Mouse signaling their fidelity to President-Elect Donald Trump.

Swamp Rabbit nodded and said, “Okay, but what’s with the money bags?”

I rattled off some background facts: Bezos and Soon-Shiong blocked their respective newspapers from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Amazon and Meta are making million-dollar donations to Trump’s so-called inauguration fund. Altman is making a million-dollar personal donation to the fund. Disney has agreed to pay $15 million to settle a weak defamation suit Trump recently brought against ABC News, which is owned by Disney.

“Enough,” Swamp Rabbit said. “A gang of billionaires are bowing to kiss Trump’s ass so that he won’t interfere with them trying to make a zillion more dollars over the next four years. They’re greedy, cowardly pigs. This surprises you?”

It does. Bezos and Zuckerberg were opposed to Trump a few years ago. Zuckerberg had Trump banished from Facebook and Instagram at one point. Bezos sued him in 2019, during Trump’s first term in office. Altman, whose company developed the ChatGPT chatbot, was a big donor to the Democratic Party. Disney could have easily beaten Trump’s lawsuit, according to many legal experts.

“My point is that these are enormously wealthy and powerful guys who know Trump is an enemy of democracy and could have fought him in court during his second term if he tried to sabotage their businesses,” I said.

I read to him from Telnaes’s farewell-to the-Post dispatch: “As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job.”

And from historian Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny, which I mentioned a few months ago: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”

Swamp Rabbit shrugged and repeated, “Greedy, cowardly pigs. This surprises you?”

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12 songs for the new year

Posted on January 6, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was nonplussed. “What’s with the playlist, Odd Man? New Year’s was six days ago. And most of these songs ain’t even about New Year’s.”

I told him that 2025 was still new, and that it took me a long while to make a 12-song list because there are so few songs about New Year’s that aren’t sentimental to the point of being cringeworthy.

“So I found some New Year’s songs that don’t have nauseating lyrics, and I filled the rest of the list with good songs that are in the New Year’s spirit even though they don’t mention the holiday.”

“What’s the New Year’s spirit?” Swamp Rabbit said. “This is a shitty time of year.”

“It’s an expression of energy and optimism and open-mindedness that defies the fact that this is a shitty time of year. We need that spirit more than ever now that the Orange Hog Monster and his minions are about to take over the government again, don’t you think?”

My mangy friend shrugged. “I’m done with thinking. When I ain’t thinking I feel much closer to my fellow Americans.”

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A playlist to celebrate the winter solstice

Posted on December 24, 2024 by oddmanout215

I walked past Swamp Rabbit’s shack yesterday and heard him grumbling about the early darkness as he tried to install a gigantic inflatable Santa Claus out front.

“Quit complaining,” I said. “Yesterday was the winter solstice. That means we might get about thirty seconds more daylight today than we got yesterday. We might even get some sunshine. The days will grow longer for the next six months. Our part of the world is on the rebound.”

This did not seem to cheer him, so I put together an eclectic playlist of songs that mention the sun and sent it to him. Everything from the Beatles to Billie Holiday, from Donovan to Ray Charles, who was so talented he even made “You Are My Sunshine” sound soulful.

I haven’t heard back from Swamp Rabbit, so maybe my list was a bit too eclectic. Whatever. He’ll have the whole winter to listen up and make a list of his own. I have a high tolerance for corny songs and can listen to anything… except Katrina and the Waves’ “I’m Walking On Sunshine.”

Footnote: From Family’s “My Friend the Sun”: Though my friend the sun/Looks well on the run/He’s there in the distance/If you care to see.

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