Just sub any name from the crew HN describes for Nixon...
"Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American Dream. Richard Nixon stands to me for everything I would not want to happen to myself, or be, or be around. He stands for everything that I not only have contempt for, but dislike and I think should be stomped out. Greed, treachery, stupidity, cupidity, the positive power of lying, total contempt for any sort of human constructive political instinct. Everything that's wrong with America, everything that this country has demonstrated as a national trait that the world finds repugnant. The bully instinct, the power grab, the dumbness, the insensitivity. Nixon represents everything that's wrong with this country."
My favorite description for Nixon is from Norman Mailer, who if memory serves described him as someone who sneaks out at night in a small town and deposits turds in front of individual homes.
Agreed.The mediocrity isn't masking some deeper competence and there's no secret master plan underneath. It really is just a shoddy casino all the way down, and that's what makes it so fucking frustrating. While we're picking our jaws up off the floor, wondering if they're really playing 4D chess, they're actually just looting the building across the street.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
"Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." — Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
"We are a nation commanded by the sort of people who would have stolen something off of a coworker’s desk before evacuating their World Trade Center office on 9/11."
Feeling a little down today, Hamilton? ;) (Sorry, I don't mean to make light... this is some of your best writing, honestly. Your gift for finding just the right words is on full display here.)
Canadian here who grew up an IBM brat in downstate NY, went to fancy college, saw the collapse of American imperial attempt in Vietnam from the inside: neighbours and friends KIA, families/neighbourhoods torn apart, 1968 a year I'll never forget, even if I was barely a teen. The Tet offensive really blew any credibility LBJ had out of the water, cost him the NH primary and set up RFK's run against McCarthy. Point is this: I don't think either party really understands two salient emotions 'out there': (1) there is massive anger amongst folks who actually work for their family's daily bread and see the manifold grifts around them, in real time. (I'm looking at you Eric Trump and Howard Lutnick) and (2) the unspoken sense, tantamount to a massive cognitive dissonance, that maybe the US peaked just before Sputnik and, per the odious Henry Kissinger (he says the quiet part out loud in his tendentious memoir) 'is incapable of managing its own decline.' 47 has done nothing more or less than set a blowtorch to American exceptionalism...esp when he can up the grift to eyewatering scale. You folks need a new media landscape...and the courage to get out in the streets, per what this year's college grads nationwide have in mind. This is going to be some spring. But so was May 1970...and that's going to happen again.
Nam was a huge mistake. Afghanistan and Iraq were similar. Not as deadly but wasteful. Lined the pockets of some.
Sad thing is that Carter kept the US out of a war and Americans soon voted in Reagan. Then he ignored most Americans to give the wealthy tax cuts.
Americans are not very bright. Americans are lucky to be born in a land with lots of natural resources with no close enemies on our borders. They are then happy to accept their lot in life hoping someone will give them a job with healthcare. We worship our CEO's like they are kings, while thinking we are free. We are not.
Americans won't vote to ensure that they share in the nation's wealth. Or vote to keep their freedoms. Women voted away their bodily autonomy now. Twice.
Not all. Just enough that fall for the guns, gods or lies about communism.
Wave a flag. Appeal to nationalism. People gladly sign up to die. They might complain later they were lied to. They don't listen to those that tell them at the time they are being lied to. Many will never admit they were wrong. Your cognitive dissonance analogy is spot on.
Americans are not bright. Some are. Most? Many? Not even close.
First off, beautifully written: not a single note. HN has earned this moment (hopefully) of doubt and pain through mastery of his craft; the rest of us still have to (sorry, Tom Waits) get behind the mule every morning and plow. People alive in our own communities, right now, have been subjected to much worse and endured, if not exactly triumphed yet. Let's re-commit ourselves daily - multiracially and democratically - to going Nuremberg on every last one of these fuckers.
I'd like to add one more layer to this multi-tiered cake of shit
The obscenely wealthy, moral blackholes so utterly defective as humans they are not and have never been worthy of the love and esteem they so desperately seek. Rather than spend even a moment wondering why this might be, they've chosen to burn the world to ashes in a pathetic attempt to fill that void.
They are the ones funding and wielding this shoddy apparatus with all the hubris and plot armor that uncountable wealth provides. But just like every tyrant, they know they are outnumbered by orders of magnitude and live in terror of the day the hungry realize it.
We accept the existence of their hoards of money, power and resources today, that does not need to be true tomorrow.
This is our only hope for the future, or in fact, any future.
All of this on display last night under the sleepy eye of legacy media who, after decades of centering presidential politics on image and optics and respect for the office and being presidential, watched last night's complete degradation of all of those things and pretended nothing was out of line.
I only wish we could count on the next Democratic president to point to the right side of the chamber at the SOTU and say "These people are fascists! But we took our country back from them!". Then we could watch the mainstream media set their hair on fire about it for a month, after being completely unmoved by Trump pointing to the Democrats and calling them "crazy" and accusing them of "destroying our country".
I'm old enough to remember the MSM's repeated and full-throated chastisement of Obama for not trying hard enough to 'reach across the aisle' and for not inviting Mitch McConnell to the WH for drinks. And I can't think of a single occasion during either of Trump's terms when he was asked point-blank why he wasn't reaching across the aisle. I guess that's no longer important.
In fact, openly demonizing the opposing party and the people who didn't vote for you is now hardly worth acknowledgement, let alone opprobrium by the press. Until, of course, the next Democratic president, when the media will be filled with a renewed sense of the importance of decorum, tradition and bipartisanship and suddenly remember how to frame transgressions of those things as scandalous affronts to the dignity of the office.
Right - and whatever happened to "I will be a president for everybody, not just the people who voted for me". In fact, the opposite, if you didn't vote for me you will be taken out behind the barn.
Worthy of Hunter Thompson!
Just sub any name from the crew HN describes for Nixon...
"Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American Dream. Richard Nixon stands to me for everything I would not want to happen to myself, or be, or be around. He stands for everything that I not only have contempt for, but dislike and I think should be stomped out. Greed, treachery, stupidity, cupidity, the positive power of lying, total contempt for any sort of human constructive political instinct. Everything that's wrong with America, everything that this country has demonstrated as a national trait that the world finds repugnant. The bully instinct, the power grab, the dumbness, the insensitivity. Nixon represents everything that's wrong with this country."
-Hunter S. Thompson, 1978.
My favorite description for Nixon is from Norman Mailer, who if memory serves described him as someone who sneaks out at night in a small town and deposits turds in front of individual homes.
That is hilarious. Thanks, you brightened my morning. (!)
Indeed...Ham can fucking WRITE...
Yea, this is the world he feared.
Indeed. Shades of “Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail.”
Agreed.The mediocrity isn't masking some deeper competence and there's no secret master plan underneath. It really is just a shoddy casino all the way down, and that's what makes it so fucking frustrating. While we're picking our jaws up off the floor, wondering if they're really playing 4D chess, they're actually just looting the building across the street.
H.L. Mencken observed:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Touche. Here's a Carl Sagan that gives me shivers. I closed my last post (https://homogullibilis.substack.com/p/confirmation-bias-unfalsifiable) with this one:
"Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." — Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
"We are a nation commanded by the sort of people who would have stolen something off of a coworker’s desk before evacuating their World Trade Center office on 9/11."
God damn
Perfect line!
Feeling a little down today, Hamilton? ;) (Sorry, I don't mean to make light... this is some of your best writing, honestly. Your gift for finding just the right words is on full display here.)
Canadian here who grew up an IBM brat in downstate NY, went to fancy college, saw the collapse of American imperial attempt in Vietnam from the inside: neighbours and friends KIA, families/neighbourhoods torn apart, 1968 a year I'll never forget, even if I was barely a teen. The Tet offensive really blew any credibility LBJ had out of the water, cost him the NH primary and set up RFK's run against McCarthy. Point is this: I don't think either party really understands two salient emotions 'out there': (1) there is massive anger amongst folks who actually work for their family's daily bread and see the manifold grifts around them, in real time. (I'm looking at you Eric Trump and Howard Lutnick) and (2) the unspoken sense, tantamount to a massive cognitive dissonance, that maybe the US peaked just before Sputnik and, per the odious Henry Kissinger (he says the quiet part out loud in his tendentious memoir) 'is incapable of managing its own decline.' 47 has done nothing more or less than set a blowtorch to American exceptionalism...esp when he can up the grift to eyewatering scale. You folks need a new media landscape...and the courage to get out in the streets, per what this year's college grads nationwide have in mind. This is going to be some spring. But so was May 1970...and that's going to happen again.
Nam was a huge mistake. Afghanistan and Iraq were similar. Not as deadly but wasteful. Lined the pockets of some.
Sad thing is that Carter kept the US out of a war and Americans soon voted in Reagan. Then he ignored most Americans to give the wealthy tax cuts.
Americans are not very bright. Americans are lucky to be born in a land with lots of natural resources with no close enemies on our borders. They are then happy to accept their lot in life hoping someone will give them a job with healthcare. We worship our CEO's like they are kings, while thinking we are free. We are not.
Americans won't vote to ensure that they share in the nation's wealth. Or vote to keep their freedoms. Women voted away their bodily autonomy now. Twice.
Not all. Just enough that fall for the guns, gods or lies about communism.
Wave a flag. Appeal to nationalism. People gladly sign up to die. They might complain later they were lied to. They don't listen to those that tell them at the time they are being lied to. Many will never admit they were wrong. Your cognitive dissonance analogy is spot on.
Americans are not bright. Some are. Most? Many? Not even close.
Thank you. A thought...the late great folksinger/activist Utah Phillips once
observed this: 'The most radical thing in American life is a long memory.'
First off, beautifully written: not a single note. HN has earned this moment (hopefully) of doubt and pain through mastery of his craft; the rest of us still have to (sorry, Tom Waits) get behind the mule every morning and plow. People alive in our own communities, right now, have been subjected to much worse and endured, if not exactly triumphed yet. Let's re-commit ourselves daily - multiracially and democratically - to going Nuremberg on every last one of these fuckers.
I have two quibbles with this post:
1. Your writing is too damn good to skim over even a word-screws with my supposed time management.
2. You are being unfair to Price is Right contestants.
If we ever make it out of this societal hellscape and into something better, are you going to pivot to reviewing restaurants?
"If" doing a lot of heavy lifting here
Excellent writing as always!
I'd like to add one more layer to this multi-tiered cake of shit
The obscenely wealthy, moral blackholes so utterly defective as humans they are not and have never been worthy of the love and esteem they so desperately seek. Rather than spend even a moment wondering why this might be, they've chosen to burn the world to ashes in a pathetic attempt to fill that void.
They are the ones funding and wielding this shoddy apparatus with all the hubris and plot armor that uncountable wealth provides. But just like every tyrant, they know they are outnumbered by orders of magnitude and live in terror of the day the hungry realize it.
We accept the existence of their hoards of money, power and resources today, that does not need to be true tomorrow.
This is our only hope for the future, or in fact, any future.
All of this on display last night under the sleepy eye of legacy media who, after decades of centering presidential politics on image and optics and respect for the office and being presidential, watched last night's complete degradation of all of those things and pretended nothing was out of line.
I only wish we could count on the next Democratic president to point to the right side of the chamber at the SOTU and say "These people are fascists! But we took our country back from them!". Then we could watch the mainstream media set their hair on fire about it for a month, after being completely unmoved by Trump pointing to the Democrats and calling them "crazy" and accusing them of "destroying our country".
I'm old enough to remember the MSM's repeated and full-throated chastisement of Obama for not trying hard enough to 'reach across the aisle' and for not inviting Mitch McConnell to the WH for drinks. And I can't think of a single occasion during either of Trump's terms when he was asked point-blank why he wasn't reaching across the aisle. I guess that's no longer important.
In fact, openly demonizing the opposing party and the people who didn't vote for you is now hardly worth acknowledgement, let alone opprobrium by the press. Until, of course, the next Democratic president, when the media will be filled with a renewed sense of the importance of decorum, tradition and bipartisanship and suddenly remember how to frame transgressions of those things as scandalous affronts to the dignity of the office.
Right - and whatever happened to "I will be a president for everybody, not just the people who voted for me". In fact, the opposite, if you didn't vote for me you will be taken out behind the barn.
Suckers and marks, obsessed with loser shitheels, sank the ship. As we float in the water, they push us under.
Some people call this a 'circus' I call it a tawdry Casino where money comes first.
Brilliant writing. Thank you.
Words like a river.
and you did not even start on the feckless Dems
Do you have to name a party..........?
There is nothing but nothingness.
My first comment ever! This author’s writing is just too good to pass up.
Brilliant!
Genius!
And sad, unrelentingly sad.
This is fantastic