Reading From the Book Of Giants

And so we come to the end of the world...

Well, maybe not really. Not the end, exactly. But you must confess, there is something a little apocalyptic about the scenes coming out of Houston right now.

And I’m going to write about that today. I’m going to get rather (sorry) Biblical on you. Or, at least, I’m going to use pseudo-Biblical language. And I’m going to reference the apocryphal book of Enoch.

For you see, I’m going to talk about floods, and Giants, and very, very wealthy men...

Who, it seems, if they could, would consume the world right down to the bedrock.

And never once consider they shouldn’t.

*

Background: for a variety of obscure reasons (obscure even to me, sometimes) I’ve always been interested in the various literatures which float around at the edges of religion—books and stories, that is, that arise from the same sources as do the major holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but which are not themselves considered canonical. (And, by the way, I’m no scholar. I’m just reading these books out of curiosity. If you are a specialist in the field, feel free to write in with comments and corrections.)

Now, understand, I’m not particularly religious. I don’t treat these books as sacred texts. (I’m not sure I believe in sacred texts.) But, they can be rather fascinating, both as literature and history.

And, there are a bunch of such books about, actually. Jewish books, early Christian books, Gnostic books, and on and on. you’ll recall that a Gospel of Judas showed up back in the early 1980s, though the book itself supposedly dates from the late second century C.E. It relates the tale of Jesus from the perspective of a Judas himself, here presented as a hero who does what has to be done so that Christ’s mission will be complete. Needless to say, the book created rather a stir in certain circles.

But, right at the moment, the books which interest me the most are Enoch 1 and Enoch 2.

Enoch, of course, shows up briefly in Genesis as the prophet who “walks with God,” and ultimately vanishes into heaven. It’s almost just a cameo role, hardly worth mentioning, and Enoch might not be remembered at all if it hadn’t been for someone (or many someones) who sometime around 300 BCE adopted him as a major character in a whole series of tales (epics, really) in which his adventures in heaven are recounted in great detail.

For a variety of reasons, the books of Enoch almost completely disappeared in the West (both for Jews and Christians). But, fortunately, they survived elsewhere, for instance in the Ethiopian Bible.

Why I mention all of this is that Enoch...or rather, Enoch’s authors...also talk about the Great Flood that drowns out mankind for its “wickedness” in Genesis. But Enoch has a curious take on the whole story. In his version, where everything goes wrong is waaay back, sometime after the expulsion from Eden, when certain Angels looked upon “the daughters of men,” and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, got the hots.

They, these angels, descended to earth and got very busy with the ladies. Then, when they were done, the women in question had hybrid children, the Nephilim, or Giants, who unfortunately, did not take after the heavenly side of the family. Rather, they grew up to be monsters, brutish and evil, and wholly devoted to themselves.

In fact, the Giants ate everything. They consumed all they could find, utterly without restraint, eating the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea...and, finally, humans. The world, indeed, was stripped bare, as we read in Chapter 7 of 1 Enoch:


And the women conceiving brought forth giants,

Whose stature was each three hundred cubits. These devoured all which the labour of men produced; until it became impossible to feed them;

When they turned themselves against men, in order to devour them;

And began to injure birds, beasts, reptiles, and fishes, to eat their flesh one after another, and to drink their blood.

Then the earth reproved the unrighteous.


Finally, things got so bad, that heaven had to respond or else all life on earth would perish. So, the Great Flood was sent, and the giants vanished under its waves.

*

There’s lots of other really great lines in the book. For instance, at one point, the humans who are being cannibalized by the Giants appeal to heaven, “And men, being destroyed, cried out; and their voice reached to heaven” (1 Enoch 8: 9), and what may be my very favorite line is in Chapter 9, and involves the earth herself seeking redress, “The earth deprived of her children has cried even to the gate of heaven,” (1 Enoch 9: 2).

I’ve always been interested in Enoch’s interpretation of the Flood because it sort of says that it wasn’t humans who’d sinned, and who were getting exterminated, but rather the Giants, who never learned empathy, never learned to control their appetites, and never discovered the virtues of self-restraint.

That’s rather more satisfying, don’t you think, than the more usual view of things, where we are ourselves the villains? And Enoch gives us a God who is our avenger rather than our destroyer, which is comforting.

But...also...doesn’t it sound just a bit familiar?

Doesn’t it sound, just a little, like the run up to Houston?


*

We’re learning, now, that when Harvey hit Houston, it may have encountered a city uniquely vulnerable. It appears—at least from what I’m reading in the papers and on the Web—that some city authorities, some city planners, and some real estate developers had been told repeatedly that there were dangers in the way they were building and where they were building. It seems that they had been informed that constructing homes and stores over wetlands, and in areas that might have taken run-off during storms, was to court disaster. But, or so I’m reading, they did not change their behavior. It was easier, more profitable for them, to just keep doing what they were doing.

I’m reading, too, that Harvey himself was a bit of a surprise to some authorities, both in Texas and elsewhere, because it was a super-storm, a storm of almost unbelievable power. Again, they had been warned that such storms were coming, and more will come, because the world is warming, and the consequences of that will include ever more, and ever more potent hurricanes. Indeed, if they’d ever doubted it, they could have simply looked at recent history—Katrina, Sandy, and now Harvey.

Yet, they were surprised anyway. Why? Maybe because they were busy telling themselves (or, at least, telling the rest of us) that global warming was a “Hoax,” “Junk Science,” and “a Liberal conspiracy hatched by the Chinese to cripple our economy.” Or, to put it another way, it was in their interest to deny the facts.

Moreover...and here’s the really scary one...we are discovering, too, that this will probably not be the end of it. We are finding that the Great and the Powerful will almost certainly not learn from Harvey...just as they didn’t learn from Katrina and Sandy. As I write this, I am already starting to see comments in certain quarters about how Harvey really wasn’t the result of climate change, and how it wasn’t anyone’s fault that Houston is underwater, and how, really, government relief and/or regulation would be a mistake, and we ought to just sit back and let corporations and Free Enterprise get on with their high and holy business.

Or, again to put it all another way, those of us who are not rich and powerful, should know our place, not interfere, and wait quietly while storm, and flood, and fire, and desert...grow closer every day.


*

In short, the Rich and the Powerful, the 1%, the Billionaire Boys Club, whatever you want to call it...in Houston and elsewhere...had no intention then, and has no intention now of hearing calls for restraint. They will drill, and they will extract, and they will mine, and they will burn, and they pollute as much they like, thank you very much. And if we object, well, tough shit for us.

Their will to power is unbounded, their capacity for consumption unlimited, and their hunger is (alas) insatiable.

By now, I am sure, you see the link...my none-too-subtle metaphor, the connection between the Giants who consumed the very earth itself, and our own Power Elite...who, like Giants, have no interest in self-restraint.

Which is...disturbing.

Thus, I hope there is, out there, somewhere...maybe you who read this...an Enoch, who will have the talent and the prophetic power necessary to confront our Giants, and help them understand that restraint and self-control are absolutely necessary for our survival—theirs as well as ours, for not even Giants are tall enough to stand above the Flood which may be coming.

Or, if there is not an Enoch...

Then let us pray...or, if you do not pray, then devoutly hope...that there is at least a Noah, and an Ark big enough to carry birds, and beasts, and ourselves away...

From the children of rebel angels...whose appetites were such that they devoured all, until, at last, and in anguish, the earth deprived of her children cried even to the gate of heaven.

And heaven’s fury may well be...

Brutal, beyond our power to imagine.




---

Sources:

The Book of Enoch http://book-ofenoch.com/

A transgression, but in a good cause

[Note: I will shortly be posting the following to cacaus99percent.com, a liberal web-based publication.]
1.

I am about to violate the letter, if not the spirit of the law...that is, the law of this website. But, I hope you’ll forgive me, for I do have a good reason.

It has to do with our unity as a movement, and the salvation of our country, in an age of incipient tyranny.

Let me explain.


2.

The rule that I’m about to break is in “The Dreaded Site Meta #1,” by joe shikspack. The rule in question is “Don’t Throw Spitballs,” and joe shikspack elaborates this with, “A lot of folks have come here from another site where there was much unpleasantness,” and he asks that users not waste valuable bandwidth by, well, hating on the unnamed Other Site.

I agree with the rule. It is an excellent idea. And, most of time, I will do my level best to obey it. But, I need to mention that Other Site, not to vent, but to express a concern about the larger political system.

First, background. Yes, like almost everyone else here, I was on the Other Site, posting essays. And, yes, I ended up taking heat about a couple of them.

Though, I ought to mention that this was, in a way, my fault. I had discovered the Other Site and been delighted to find a place where I could post my inarticulate left of center mumblings. But, I committed the one unforgivable sin of the freelance writer. I did not thoroughly investigate the publication before I submitted. If I had, I would have realized that the Other Site had a very particular slant, and a very particular point of view.

There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. Every publication does have a preferred slant, even if they think they don’t. It was just that I hadn’t realized that the Other Site’s particular slant was that Hillary Clinton should have won (I agree) and that Bernie Sanders, or more particularly, Bernie Sanders’ supporters were a problem (I don’t agree).

But, stupidly, I had not bothered to figured that out. I had assumed there was room on the Other Site for some mild criticism of the DNC and perhaps of Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy, if not for Hillary Clinton herself.

As I say, I’d been stupid.

3.

You all have your own stories, I’m sure, of bad times on the Other Site. And I suspect most of yours are far more gripping than mine. So, I’ll be short. I had two incidents of interest. The first was when I made some fairly off-handed remarks about an article I’d seen in which Nancy Pelosi was quoted as saying that people didn’t want the Democratic party to change, or to have a new strategy—this only a few weeks after the election of Donald Trump, and coming just before a series of additional humiliating defeats in special elections for vacated Congressional seats.

I posted the piece, and I had a few complimentary remarks, but I also had several that were absolutely furious. One individual accused me of being, frankly, not able to read, and that I had completely misinterpreted the article. I went back and looked at it, afraid that I’d made an error. But, no, it said exactly what I’d said it said.

The second incident occurred a little later. Here, I did a mostly comic piece about how the Trump administration was beyond parody. How can you mock a clown? But, again, in one throw-away line...just one line...I made some reference to the idea that if Bernie been allowed to run, he would have won.

Most of the comments I received on that posting were positive, maybe not completely so, but positive in varying degrees. However, to my amazement, I got a comment that was really quite bitter. It took that one line about Bernie Sanders and made it a personal affront. How dare I, this reader asked, say such a thing? How dare I imply that Hillary wasn’t the better candidate? Then she concluded, “Enjoy your flag.”

I was startled. How could anyone be so emotional about one line? Also, I didn’t know what a flag was. I’d never heard of them. I looked them up. I discovered that if enough “trusted users” give you a flag, your comment can get erased, and your own posting privileges endangered. In other words, this individual was so furious with me, furious over one line, that she was willing to pull out the ultimate weapon of the Other Site... and use it.

It was kind of startling.


4.
But...none of the above is really important.

I’m not, repeat not, particularly concerned about the negative comments I received on the Other Site. Even the “flag” doesn’t bother me over much. Simply put, if you’re going to post to the web, or try to publish anything, you’re going to get negative comments. We don’t have to like it (and I don’t), but it is true.

But the issue...the real issue...is the fury that seemed to transfix the individuals who so violently disagreed with my postings. The man who accused me of illiteracy, the woman who flagged me, there was an awful lot of anger there. Which, I’m afraid, is indicative of a much larger phenomenon. I see it in a lot of places. Not just on the Other Site. That is, many Hillary Clinton supporters are justifiably furious that their candidate was so grievously cheated...but, sometimes, that fury is released not on the Republicans who put Trump on office, but on the Bernie supporters whose candidate represented an alternative to Hillary.

Which is not to throw stones. I see a very similar behavior in some Bernie supporters (not to mention third party people). I see a similar fury, and I see that fury sometimes vented on people and organizations who are really quite innocent. I suppose, now and then, I’ve done it myself. Mea Culpa, and all that.

Just human nature at work? Yes, I suppose. But, it worries me. We are in, let’s face it, the fight of our lives. We have in the White House an unstable, would-be despot who is fully capable of plunging the world into a nuclear holocaust. We have around him, either near or far (even if they’ve recently returned to Breitbart), people who can only be called overt Fascists. We have behind him, supporting him with money and propaganda, vastly powerful Oligarchs who dream of reducing the Federal government to a shell, and of reducing us, its citizens, more or less openly to the status of serfs.

That, I submit, is a genuinely existential crisis. Unless we fight back, and fight back hard, we are going down. America as a nation is over. American democracy is finished.

So, I wonder, if maybe, there needs to be some kind of greater attempt at unity. I wonder if, somehow, we need to put aside...at least temporarily...our internal divisions. I wonder if we don’t need to say, “Yes, my side was cheated, and I’m angry at your side, but we will, for the moment, work together. Because the consequences of disunity are too horrible to consider.”

5.
Is that possible, I wonder? Can we somehow come together?

I hope so. I’m certainly going to make an effort. I’m going to continue to post to this site, but also to the Other Site. I’m sure many of you do the same.

So, maybe it is possible. I hope so.

Yet, I also worry. I keep thinking of that “flag.” That flag so quickly and freely given.

Because, you see, it reminds me of another flag I saw once. It, too, was defiant and proud, and it sent a message.

The problem? It flew over the National Cemetery of Santa Fe, just an hour’s drive from where I live.

And that flag, for all its beauty and defiance, will be seen by few of the living...

And absolutely none of the dead.

~mjt

Speaking In Tongues

This is going to be difficult to write. I may, indeed, fail at the effort...for which I will ask your forgiveness in advance.

But, here is the thing. I am about to attempt an essay in which I will combine two men...two radically different, indeed, antithetical men. So different that, to use a metaphor from science, one might be matter and the other antimatter. And should these two ever meet...annihilation is all too possible.

To explain:

We went to visit our son and his wife in San Antonio last week. We returned on Tuesday, exhausted from the confusions and discomforts of travel in the modern age. But, once home, we rushed back out again, this time to the Central United Methodist Church and the second meeting of the Poor People's Campaign, “a national call for moral revival,” hosted by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis.

It was, needless to say, amazing. Reverend Barber was, well, astonishing. I wrote later he may be the single greatest public speaker I’ve heard in decades. And, he was surrounded by a great many other individuals, including Rev. Theoharis and a great many local clergy and of various faith (or no faith) communities in the state.

The church was packed...people filled the place beyond the bursting point, every pew was occupied, every spot of habitable floor was filled, scores of people waited in the parking lot outside, listening to the proceedings on loudspeakers.

We got lucky. We were able to get in to the vestibule and could actually see the proceedings...if not exactly closely. I was even able to take a few photos with my phone, albeit not very good ones. More importantly we were able to hear the speakers. Commentary ranged from the demonstrations and later murders in Charlottesville to the generally depressing moral standards of our benighted times. Barber and others also discussed the Poor People’s Campaign and its general aims and goals—which, the speakers implied, was not so much to be a new resistance group as to assist and co-ordinate the efforts of the many, many already existing resistance groups around the country.

As to that, as to the Campaign, well, I’ll say little about it other than that it seems to me a remarkable effort. I intend to get involved with it in some fashion, and if you have any interest in doing something similar, here’s the website: https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/

But, mostly, at least in this piece, I am going to focus on Barber...partly because he was such an impressive speaker, but also because he is a perfect symbol for our situation. Here is a man who is genuinely charismatic, who genuinely represents what is best about political Christianity, and who (with others) has begun a movement that could really and truly bring moral focus, and vast energies, to the struggle against the Trump Administration and the insidious forces behind it.

Frankly, I found him...and his proposed movement...quite fascinating. And that’s not easy for me to say. I don’t come from a Christian background. My parents were agnostics, rationalism and materialism have always been key components of my personal belief system, and when I finally did get involved in a church some years ago, it was because of those vague and flabby reasons that cause most of us to drift into organized religion at some point in middle age—“We are going for the kids,” etc.

Yet, in Barber, I discovered an individual who could make me...well, not exactly believe, but, shall we say? take the church’s role in progressive politics very seriously, indeed. Even before I heard him speak, I’d begun to wonder if churches and synagogues and mosques and humanist secular assemblies, somehow working together, won’t be the backbone of the anti-Trump movement. (Even the tiny, little resistance group I helped to organize here in town, all twelve or so of us, calls itself “not faith-based, but faith-informed.”) Now, with Barber, and the people I saw around him that night, I have become almost certain of that supposition.

Which is an interesting thing, don’t you think? A curious possibility. That religion in general and Christianity in particular, which in their Right-Wing forms have done so much damage to our nation, and to our democracy, might become as well (forgive the liturgic image) our salvation?

But...

I said that this piece was an attempt to bring two opposites into the same text. I shall attempt that now.

Not long ago, I wrote another little essay about another man, Charles Koch, half the Koch brothers and a dedicated enemy of all we hold dear. According to several sources (I am, myself, using Rebecca Onion’s article in Slate, “What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority”), Koch sees himself as something of a religious figure as well. Not in the sense of a man of God or anything like that. Rather, he sees himself as a champion of “economic liberty,” which, in practice, means he opposes any attempt to impose limits and boundaries on the behavior of the very wealthy, i.e., himself.

I suppose a theologian would argue that Koch is thus guilty of the sin of self-worship. He has defined himself as God, and anyone who opposes the will of God is to be sent straight away to hell.

For the moment, I’m going to take a pass on the theological aspects of Koch’s mentality and look instead at his self-perception. Again, according to several sources, Koch has compared himself to Martin Luther, as a man at the heart of a moral revolution, unleashing powers of unimaginable fury, capable of remaking the world...

Curiously enough, I think Koch may be quite right.

Only, not as Martin Luther. Not in the sense that he defines the principles, for good or bad, which will transform the world...

But rather, as the man...or something in the shape of a man...who so offends the world that all good men and women unite against him...and find, in the process, strength they had never once imagined they possessed. And, then, in their union and with new found powers...they remake the world.

Rather dramatic, wouldn’t you say?

Almost, indeed, Biblical.


***

Addendum

At one point during the meeting (and how much like a gospel meeting it was!) the Reverend Barber mentioned that he is of the Pentecostal tradition. I must confess that I didn’t know there was a liberal, progressive Pentecostal tradition. I always thought of Pentecostalism as, well, you know, hand in glove with the reactionary right...denying evolution and insisting that homosexuality is a mortal sin.

How very wrong I was! For, here, in Barber, was a completely different Pentecostalism, one I could admire.

And it just so happened that I the week before I’d finished reading a book which mentioned Pentecostalism—specifically, Philip Jenkins’ *The Next Christendom*. In it, Jenkins writes about the emergence of a southern Christianity, focused in Africa, Asia, and South America, and very different from the Christianities of Europe and Euro-America (which, he suspects, may be dying out).

In the book, Jenkins also makes the fascinating observation that Pentecostalism, which is one of the fastest growing Christian communities in the world, is actually not really a part of the Reformation tradition. It is, in some ways, actually a completely new branch of Christianity, different from Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy. Why? Because it completely democratizes the faith. It says that anyone...anyone at all!...can have direct contact with the divine. There are no uniquely blessed apostles superior to the rest of us, no saints who are uniquely touched by God, no Popes or Bishops who are uniquely empowered to speak for the Greater Glory, no ...well, no seal of the prophets.

Whether that democratization is a good thing or a bad is an open question. After all, a good many lives have been lost after some undiagnosed schizophrenic has decided he’d been having regular tête-à-têtes with the All Mighty and then led his followers into battle. (Think the Lord’s Resistance Army and The Taiping Rebellion.)

Still, once again, as a metaphor for our own situation, I wonder if it doesn’t work quite well. The myth of Pentecost is that, of course, the apostles were wrestling with the fact that Jesus was no longer among them. And then, behold! The Holy Spirit descended upon them and they found themselves filled with fire and prophecy, and they went forth to teach all nations.

Well, I don’t know about the Holy Spirt part. But fire and prophecy? And the going forth to save our (secular) nation?

Those, I think, are very much on hand.

***

Until next time...

Onward and upward.

Knights Templar

So, here’s the deal. I keep thinking about Trump...as do we all, of course. But, also as we all do (I suspect), there is another aspect of the Trumpian problem that concerns me, perhaps even more. I mean, of course, the people behind him.

Oh, yes, that includes the “deplorables,” who voted for him, and the alt-Right, and Bannon and his crowd of...of...of, well, whatever the hell they are. (Strasserist? Apocalyptist? I really don’t know.)

But, more importantly, I’m thinking of a certain discrete slice of the wealthy and powerful who support him. Not all of them, to be sure. But, a slice...

And what frightens me most about such people is this: Are they a movement? Or a church? A very dark and shadowy church.

To explain, the other day I saw an article in Slate by Rebecca Onion, “What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority.” It is an interview with Nancy MacLean, who has recently done the fascinating book, Democracy in Chains. In the book, MacLean details how certain members of the obscenely rich, and particularly the Koch brothers, have organized into what I can only call a conspiracy (though MacLean dislikes that term) with the goal of imposing on the rest of us a kind of dictatorship of the Plutoletariat, a system in which government would be prevented—by law!—from interfering with the economy. Which is to say, from imposing any real restrictions on the behavior of the rich and powerful.

They’ve even, says MacLean, selected a Marx for their revolution, the anarcho-capitalist academic James Buchanan.

It is terrifying material. But the thing that struck me the hardest was a comment that MacLean made about one of the Koch brothers, specifically Charles. She notes, “I see him as someone who’s quite messianic. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther and his effort being like the Protestant Reformation.”

I believe this is a very important insight in that it explains much of what really motivates the anti-democratic Right in our day and age. Specifically, it reveals that objectivism/libertarianism/whatever is not, in fact, a rational movement. It is more akin to a religion, and its efforts are more like a crusade than a political movement.

I think it also explains a bit about why we, on the Left, are having trouble opposing such people. We do things like, say, look at the actual record of economic policy and expect law makers to respond in a rational manner. For example, we ask, “do higher minimum wages increase the overall prosperity of the society as a whole.” We carry out our studies, and sure enough, it turns out that they do. So, we point at the data and say, “See? See? It just makes sense.”

But we miss the point. Prosperity is not what these people are after. (At least, for anyone but themselves.) What matters to them is “morality.” For them, it is a sin for anyone to tell them to pay an employee more than they wish to.  If, in the process, they end up bankrupting most of society...well, so be it, so long as their high and holy “right” to do as they please, economically, is not infringed upon.

Which means we are at a disadvantage. We approach them expecting them to behave as we would...expecting them, that is, to be a political movement in the same sense that we are a movement, and, like us, heirs to the Enlightenment tradition.

But they are no such thing. They are a religion, a church militant, armed and zealous...like Templars in Jerusalem.

The difference being, of course, that these Templars worship neither God nor the demon envisioned by the knights’ destroyers. Rather, for them, the supreme law, the supreme judge, the supreme being whose will it is a sin to oppose in even the smallest things, is...

Themselves.

 *
 Rebecca Onion, “What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority," Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2017/06/james_mcgill_buchanan_s_terrifying_vision_of_society_is_the_intellectual.html

On why it isn’t possible to sound like P.G. Wodehouse and talk about Trump (a lament)

Okay, so a while back, I did a little piece on the kind of science fiction I’d like to do about the Trump administration. One of the people who bravely suffered through my turgid prose, “La Dona,” very kindly suggested that I might want to try to actually, well, write the aforesaid story...instead of just talking about writing it.

As I say, La Dona was being very kind and I deeply appreciated the encouragement. Yet, I realized, upon reflection, that there is a real problem with writing about American politics today. To wit, I have an urge to make it funny. To be precise, I want to write like the great British humorist, P.G. Wodehouse. To be even more precise, I would like my prose to sound a bit like the nasal intonations of one of his most famous characters, Bertie Wooster.

As I’m sure you know, Bertie’s a charming young Johnny of the upper class who’s nice enough...quite the dickens of a fellow...but he’s got all the brain power of your average cherry stone clam after a lobotomy. I mean, basically short on the jolly old brain cells, if you know what I mean. A bit thin in the cerebellum, as they’d say down at the Drones Club. (But, not to worry. For general sagacity and profoundity, he relies on Jeeves, his butler, who is positively dripping with the stuff. Never can tell who’ll get a big one. Brain, I mean.)

Anyway, that’s who I want to sound like while I’m doing fiction about Washington. I mean, good old Bertie is just the chap. Dead solid cinch and all that.

Except...except...then I tried to do it. I mean, I tried to write like him. And, the result? Well, the term “total, full-speed, fourteen carat debacle” drifted into the frontal lobes. With a side order of abject disaster.

Here’s the rub, as the poet chappie would say. Suppose you sat down to your high powered, fuel injected, German engineered word processor and set out to write a funny story about American politics today. Well, you could start out with the DNC being handed on a silver platter a candidate (one Bernie) who could raise billions with the twist of a nostril, and who packed ‘em at the campaign meetings like Billy Sunday on a Tuesday. Somebody bound to win, in other words.

But, then, lo and behold, the Powers That Be decide instead to throw the election to a candidate who may or may not be just ducky...personally, I’m rather keen on her....but she’s about as popular with a certain (large) class of voters as a plutonium enema and so, basically, bottom line, viz., therefore, and thus...they snatch Defeat from The Bicuspids of Victory and guarantee themselves a loss.

Boffo stuff, to be sure. But it’s been done! I mean, someone has beat us to the punch. It’s been on TV and everything.

Okay, so let’s try another approach. Let’s say that the RNC finds itself confronting a candidate so vile, so vulgar, so fascistic, and so basically ridiculous that he campaigns on a slogan of “grab ‘em by the pussy” and openly talks about walls and storm troopers. Oh, and he also brags about all the help he’s getting from our friends, the Russians.

But, rather than unite against this ranging loony tune who’s an existential threat to the nation if not the entire Western world, the GOP cheerfully says, “so long as he cuts taxes on billionaires, snuffs Obamacare, and makes the world safe for oil companies...well, that’s terrific. And what the heck if whole bunches of poor people die in the street, and Putin’s in the White House, and China takes over the Pacific and crushes our economy, so long as we get ours...”

Hysterical, to be sure. Laughable as all get out. But, again, we’re just too late. We’re coming in three lengths behind on the outside rail while everyone else is popping corks at the winner’s circle. I mean, someone else has already milked the gag for all the laughs that could be squeezed, pasteurized, and shipped to Piggly Wiggly.

Fine...

So suppose, instead, we do a story where the aforesaid Luna Tuna is now in the White House and he then proceeds to alienate America’s friends near and abroad, proves utterly ineffectual at working with Congress, communicates chiefly via tweets (which he sends while on the toilet in the early hours), talks about modifying (or scrapping) the constitution to increase his own power, terrorizes the White House staff, appoints cabinet members whose real job is to undermine the very agencies and causes they’re meant to promote, and then wraps it all up by haranguing  boy scouts and bashing trans-gendered Navy Seals and Marine Corps officers.

Yes, yes. I know. Knee slapping. Roll ‘em in the aisles. Tears of mirth, a cert, an absolute cinch and all that. But, once more into the breaches (or at least lederhosen) dear friends, ‘cause someone’s beaten us to it again. They rode up to the carousel on a Harley and made off with the old brass ring before we even got out of the gate. Danged frustrating, if you ask me.

Well, all right, if we gotta...let’s try again. This time we’ll make the White House a nightmare sitcom where the long suffering White House Press Secretary, Sean (“Melissa’s Mini-Me”) gets used like an errand boy until finally he can’t take it any more and quits when President Looney Toons hires Anthony (“Scarface”) Scarmucci,  who, in turn, launches off into an expletive laden rant about his boss, Reince (“And Repeat”) Priebus, who then gets tossed out the window a few days later...only to be joined by Scarmucci himself who gets canned after ten days, or actually, before he technically starts work ... which means he had a tenure measured in the negative numbers.

Ah...but...wait for it. You know its coming. As utterly absurd as this story may seem to you, me, and, of course, Gussie Fink-Nottle... and as silly a piece of ye olde theater of the absurd as we could wish...alas, it’s old hat and older underwear. Another wordsmith has hammered and tonged his way into the same plot ages and ages and ages ago. As in, on July 31. Or, as I write this on Wednesday, day before yesterday.

So, you see my problem. I just can’t keep up with the competition.

Ergo...sadly, alas, and regrettably, when it comes to modern politics, I’ll just have to abandon Bertie, and comic writing.

We need, you see, someone else...someone whose style...and subject matter... really matches the administration at hand.

Someone like, uh...er...

Stephen King springs to mind...

Wouldn’t you say?

Until next time, onward and upward.