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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
“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?”
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.”
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.
Swamp Rabbit had corralled my laptop and was scrolling through the daily news. “I don’t see nothin’ about Luigi Mangione, the guy who snuffed that millionaire CEO. Did some other killer bump him out of the news cycle?”
“He just got charged with first-degree murder,” I said. “People are still talking about him. You’d know this if you’d been at Clark Park last weekend.”
I was referring to the site of a popular farmers market in West Philly. A bearded guy who looked like Karl Marx was there, hawking a newspaper called The Communist and shouting “Free Luigi! Join the Communists.” He was capitalizing — pardon the expression — on the notoriety of a fellow radical, Mangione, whose memes have been all over the Internet.
Meanwhile, the other vendors were selling fruit and vegetables, poinsettias and little Christmas trees and so on, but business was slow because of the cold. I thought about approaching them to suggest they borrow a leaf from the Communist’s book and use Mangione as a sales tool. I could hear them in my head:
“Free Luigi! Eat your Brussels sprouts.”
“Free Luigi! What’s Christmas without a tree?”
“Free Luigi! Happy holidays! Don’t forget your yams.”
Swamp Rabbit pretended to be appalled. “How can you joke about the killer of a good family man? And so what that he was the boss of UnitedHealthcare, a giant for-profit healthcare company that routinely lets sick and desperate Americans die instead of approving the necessary medical coverage?”
I showed Swamp Rabbit a recent piece in the New Yorker that examined the American tendency to elevate certain criminals to folk-hero status — Jesse James, Pretty Boy Floyd, et al. — based on the idea that they rob from the rich (and kill) in defense of the poor. This would help explain Mangione’s current popularity.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “Luigi might not be a genuine hero any more than Pretty Boy Floyd was, but he seems to have more moral sense than your average CEO.”
Footnote: I had just listened to Pete Seeger’s live version of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Now, as through this world you wander/You’ll see lots of funny men/Some will rob you with a six-gun/And some with a fountain pen…
Another: So what is Mangione all about? His reading list indicates he’s far from being a Commie. He’s not a nihilist. He’s not a liberal. Is he merely confused? Some have described his views as “heterodox,” a buzzword for the leanings of those who don’t conform to either the left or right. Your guess is as good as mine.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit took a moment to read the quote-out on my laptop, from an interview with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist Joseph O’Neill:
My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed.
“He sounds like you,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I like the phrase ‘nihilistic consumerism.’ That sums up the MAGA crowd pretty good.”
I told him to read the rest of the interview. It’s more than a diagnosis. It’s the first post-election piece I’ve read that doesn’t make me feel like all is lost regarding democracy in America:
New tactics will have to be employed. New people will have to be given leadership positions. Blue state authorities will have to coordinate with one another to protect vulnerable Americans. To make this happen, the [Democratic National Committee] should finally do what it should have done years ago: set up a political operations unit to devise and coordinate anti-GOP actions nationwide. (Fox News performs this function, and others, for the GOP.)
My sarcastic neighbor chuckled. “Does this mean you ain’t gonna withdraw from the human race and tend your garden? You’re blaming the party now, not the peeps?”
“I’m just saying I’d change things in a big way if I were in a position to make plans for the Democrats. I’d push aside the do-nothing dinosaurs — Chuck Schumer and so on. I’d make sure the chairperson of the DNC was someone who had a pulse and a sense of how to combat fascist propaganda. Someone who hasn’t fallen into the neoliberal trap the party set for itself, pandering to the rich at the expense of the working class.”
“Blah blah,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Are you sure about this O’Neill guy? He reminds me of Bernie Sanders.”
He was trying to annoy me. “What’s wrong with Bernie, swamp creature? He predicted that the Democratic party would implode if it ignored the millions of people being wooed by fascists. He was right, wasn’t he?”
Odd Man Out 