Monthly Archives: August 2015

Ceremony

photo image by Stacey Warde

photo image by Stacey Warde

In June there was a shot—
The screen door banged open
and the race began.

All summer we were in and out
until running was a ceremony
in which we ran back and forth
across the years,
the screen door waving goodbye.

Running, you think:
“We have all summer,
and even a day can seem long.”

Some days summer lasts forever.
Mine banged open and closed.

—Nicholas Campbell

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN AND HIS FELLOW DWARFS

COMMENT.INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

 

by Talmadge Jarratee

Poor Rand Paul tried to re-establish himself to the Republican voting public by attempting to take down the mighty Donald with lame imitations of the Donald’s disreputable gibberish and in doing so beame the incredible shrinking man (ISM), the kind whose emaciated skull once hung from mirrors of cherried-out jalopies driven by hooligans back in the 1950s and ‘60s. The Donald regards Senator Paul as if he is an annoying flea to be flicked off his thousand-dollar sleeve. The ISM maintained the Donald  cheapened the campaign among the 16 stooges trampling all over each other like a mad scramble to roll back every single piece of legislature the Democrats have passed since the 1930s, when President Roosevelt placed people like William O. Douglas as head of the SEC and stuck it in their big business craw.

Rand Paul began his childish whining during the first debate, when, like a little boy hiding behind his big brother facing the neighborhood bully, began challenging the Donald on “hedging” his answer on whether he’d run as an Independent. The Donald flicked him aside. Throughout the debate the senator, obviously having rehearsed his assault on the Donald in the mirror for hours in an attempt to look tough and resolute, appeared peaked with his skull recently shorn of familiar curls, possibly to seem more presidential. The ISM bobbed and weaved and slithered behind his big brother all night long like the kid every other kid in the neighborhood hates just by the sneaky look in his ferret face. Now the pathetic senator is caviling every chance he gets on all the cable stations while the ponderous Donald calls his own press conference, which is treated like a monumental happening and plays big and friendly with the press corps he previously excoriated as less than vermin.

Fox News, tortured that Donald might be the nominee, backed down, and are now ON him. The salvation.

Meanwhile, Senator Paul, whom the Donald accused of losing to him in golf, claimed the Big Bad Donald was playing on “his home course,” has seen his poll numbers plummet to near extinction—which the Donald notes—while ex-Governor Jeb Bush, the joyless non-personality lump of a brother of the blundering ex-President, sees his stooped frame wither on the vine as the Donald calls more press conferences and waxes eloquent in a show of bravado, as if he has already been elected President.

The major news cable stations—Fox, MSNBC, CNN—scurry to post …BREAKING NEWS… alerts and go apeshit as the Donald, with no notes or teleprompter, excoriates the remaining shrinking men as losers in life because they don’t know how to make money and build castles and fuck the government and are dependent on swine like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelsen and other bilious billionaires interested only in power and control to bankroll their shriveling campaigns.

The other night, with thousands cheering and the Donald regaling them, he tore into Bush who was down the road lecturing a paltry lot of 200 max in his own lackluster way about policy and trying to ignore the Donald’s barbs about his being “weak.” The exalted, entitled Bush, a hand-picked momma’s boy by the steely Barbara to be our next President, who obviously lived a sheltered childhood as he worked his way through prep schools and the University of Texas at Austin, retorts with the sneery snipes of somebody who’s never been punched in the nose—in certain realms he would be punched in the nose, just for his looks and bearing.

His voice is weak and whiny. Next to the Donald, he looks like a punk. He’s shrinking, shrinking, his numbers plummeting as he claims he’s in for the long haul with his $114 million, more than any of the other contenders, most of whom, beside the Donald, have shrunk into vapors—troll-like Jindal; Huckabee, Christ-crazed, fire-breathing ex-governor from Arkansas is near extinction (thank God); Santorum is a feeble echo in the din; Senator Graham went down in flames with his cell phone; brain-dead Perry is broke and babbling nonsense; the paleface hypocrite Walker from Wisconsin along with the weasel-faced demagogue Cruz have turned to caddying for all of the Donald’s putrid, mean-spirited, outlandish, grandiose so-called policies, sucking up in case he falls.

They’re all trying to arrest the terrible shrinking within and without by holding interviews with cable employees stuck with the rotten job of listening to their lame excuses and empty vows of hope while it’s pointed out their poll-numbers are shrinking.

Kasich looks the rumpled eastern European just got off the boat next to the sartorial Donald, who travels in his own plane with a third wife gorgeous enough to be on the cover of Vogue. Pataki is a sour pill impossible to digest. Only the venomous-tongued scarecrow of a woman Fiorino, the Hewlett-Packard devouring vampire, who looks like she belongs on a broom headed to Oz, and the doctor, who read his debate retorts from a script and likens Obamacare to slavery, are fighting off the shrinkage Donald heaps upon them. He doesn’t mention them. He knows they’re no threat. Right now he’s in the process of extinguishing the third Bush, not exactly a manly man.

But he’s got his millions, and he’s got his brother, whom he defends, and blames Obama for the situation the boob brother started and ignited, and he’s quickly backing away from every humanitarian policy or statement he ever made for the little guy and reiterating that he is “his own man” and not his dad or brother, so as to curry favor and votes from the numbskull slugs lost in the wilderness of ignorance and anger at being passed over by the new technology and the rapidly increasing ruthlessness of their own party.

What Bush is is the same flotsam and jetsam as all the rest—sans Trump—a pawn and puppet of the big money boys turning America, the greatest democracy in history, into a flat-out oligarchy.

We deserve Trump.

Talmadge Jarratee writes about politics and occasional sketches of San Francisco and, because of his views, may soon be homeless. For more on Talmadge, visit dellfranklin.com

Restless Love Syndrome

PITH.RESTLESS LOVE.YOUNGWe were so in love we couldn’t sleep,
so we got up and went walking in the
severe quiet of the pre-dawn cool, warm
morning, as Paul Weller would have it.

Hand in hand or not, we walked until
we had vanquished our new section
of town. It was ours now because we
were living together, by virtue of my

never leaving. We stopped for a 6am drink
at the 6am bar. The self-proclaimed best
omelet maker in town was there, dosing
himself with gin before the breakfast shift,

some others preparing for work, a couple
of drinkers beginning their long day of self-
sedation. We were the only couple in love,
smugly & newly & in need of this incipient

morning’s cocktail to quell the jitters of
ecstasy & moment. We had our drink
and walked slowly home into the triumphal
sunrise. I remember nothing of the day.

—Todd Young