MY ANNUAL OSCAR PREDICTIONS, FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

OK! SHOWTIME! As I do every year, here are my Oscar pics. Warning: I have never been so unsure of my picks as I am now, so don’t bet the farm. OK, I’m late so let’s not waste time:

Best Picture: Conclave. The one year I really beat the experts soundly was 2019 when I called Green Book, which I knew was sentimental in just the right Oscar-winning way. And when I missed big in 2022 it was because I couldn’t believe the Academy would go that sappy and choose CODA. It is usually (but not always) a bad idea to underestimate Oscar's taste for cheese. Conclave, with its old-fashioned high drama, high stakes, and exotic setting, seems the most defensible old-school choice notwithstanding its lack of a directing nomination. Also, as I mentioned in my review, it was a hit with the senior citizens. Anora’s lovely but, with its nudity, swearing, and sex, more a young person’s movie. I think the geezers will push this one through. 

Best Actor: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist. Like I said in my review, he suffered pretty fulsomely. But there was also enough mystery in the performance to keep you from turning away from it. 

Best Actress: Mikey Madison, Anora. If you liked nothing else about the movie you still had to love her. She’s got spunk! 

Best Supporting Actor: Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown. Everyone says Kieran Culkin, and I see it (notwithstanding the category fraud – that’s a starring performance if anything is). But Norton’s Pete Seeger is just such a well-built impersonation as well as a great emotional force I don’t see how it can miss. (Spoiler, that’s what I always say when I’m making a sucker bet.)

Best Supporting Actress: Ariana Grande, Wicked. Speaking of sucker bets! Smart money is on Zoe Saldaña but, fierce as she was, her character had no arc. Grande got the laughs and got the tears. And she can sing. 

Best Director: Coralie Fargeat, The Substance. Whatever else you think of it, it was fo-sho directed. 

Best Original Screenplay: Sean Baker, Anora.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Peter Straughan, Conclave. 

Best Cinematography: Lol Crawley, The Brutalist.

Best Film Editing: Sean Baker, Anora.

Best Score: Daniel Blumberg, The Brutalist.

Best Song: “El Mal,” Emilia Pérez.

Best Production Design: The Brutalist.

Best Costume Design: Wicked.

Best Makeup: The Substance.

Best Visual Effects: Dune: Part Two.

Best Sound: Dune: Part Two.

Best Documentary Feature: No Other Land.

Best Animated Feature: The Wild Robot.

Best International Feature: I’m Still Here. 

Best Animated Short: Yuck! 

Best Live-Action Short: A Lien.

Best Documentary Short: Incident.

ROY'S FINAL TWO BEST PICTURE NOMINEE REVIEWS -- PREDICTIONS IMMINENT!

Oscar Night approacheth. As I mentioned Friday, as has become my annual tradition/ritual/OCD symptom, I intended to have all 10 Best Picture nominees reviewed by showtime, and had eight done at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down by that point -- A Complete Unknown, Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, Nickel Boys, Emilia Pérez, The Substance, and Wicked. Here are my final two -- with predictions to come before sundown! 

Dune: Part Two. I got unexpected if mixed pleasure from Dune 1 when my Oscar duty demanded I see it in 2022 despite my general indifference-verging-on-hostility to sci-fi type pictures. With Dune 2 I got more expected if still mixed pleasure. The effects that wowed me in 2022 -- “giant flying fortresses, undulating deserts, massive sandworms with mouths like floral lampreys, dragonfly copters” – are here again, as well as huge and grotesque displays of the evil whitefaced Harkonnens’ power and cruelty.  And! Plus! We get our hero Paul Atreides actually riding a “great-grandmother” sandworm (like surfing with mountaineering axes) to win still more approbation from the Fremen, the crypto-Islamic desert rebels – and shore up the growing consensus among them that he’s the Messiah who’ll defeat the Harkonnens and make their desert a green paradise. Plus Paul (now dubbed Muad’dib to stress his gone-nativeness) and hot rebel Chani finally get together, in a very chaste and sweet way, as befits what is essentially a children’s story to which grown-up craftsmanship has been applied. And under Maestro Denis Villeneuve the craft is dazzling. If the business of getting us acquainted with the Duneiverse in Dune 1, being mostly done, is no longer there to hold those of us who are not already pre-sold, good old-fashioned epic filmmaking gets us through this one. Come Dune 3 I am definitely seeing this shit in IMAX.

I’m Still Here. Spanish and Latin American filmmakers take their years of dictatorship and the attendant horrors seriously. Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station) cleverly gives us plenty time at the outset to get comfortable with the enlightened-liberal middle-class family life of former congressman Rubens Paiva, his wife Eunice, and their five kids in Rio de Janeiro in 1970s Brazil. They frolic on the beach, have friends to meals served by a maid, engage in loving banter, and don’t talk much about the fact that Rubens stopped being a congressman because the dictators threw him out, and that military convoys have started running the streets of Rio. Then one day some greasy characters show up to remove Rubens for “questioning”; they occupy the Paivas’ house a few days, then take Eunice and the eldest daughter as well. The daughter is released after a day, Eunice after twelve days. Rubens never comes back, All this unfolds with deliberate realism, so that one might imagine it happening to oneself (a good rehearsal for what we might expect here, btw, in years to come). Eunice’s job is now to keep it together for her family, then for herself, and finally to see justice done. Selton Mello as Rubens is a cuddly bear who betrays only fleeting shadows of his own stress and fear; as Eunice, Fernanda Torres is self-possessed from the start, so her handling of the ordeal is best-case scenario -- which makes it more frightening, because it shows that terrorism terrorizes even the seemingly least-shatterproof – but, to me at least, also inspiring, because it shows what can be endured may also be rectified. I also must mention Torres’ mother and the star of Central Station, Fernanda Montenegro, as Eunice in old age and with Alzheimer’s, in a really beautifully engineered and deeply moving coda. 

OK! See you in a couple of hours with predix! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: PRE-OSCAR, POST-DISASTER EDITION.

They were playing this at the Moynihan Train Hall last weekend. Random, right?

Hey, Sunday’s the Academy Awards! Regular readers may know I’m a big Oscar nerd, so I’ve been reviewing this year's ten Best Picture nominees in preparation. At Roy Edroso Breaks It Down I have eight done so far -- A Complete Unknown, Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, Nickel Boys, Emilia Pérez, The Substance, and Wicked – all of which reviews are now unlocked for non-subscribers, and this weekend I’ll have Dune 2 and I’m Still Here wrapped and reviewed here at alicublog along with my predictions by showtime. Oooh, so exciting! 

Maybe that sort of thing doesn’t thrill you, but it’s a nice change of pace from the disintegration of our republic, and symptoms of it like the “U.S. foreign policy as The McLaughlin Group for Imbeciles” presented at the White House today with Zelenskyy. Oh, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, what a falling off was there! My opinion of Vance in particular was already subterranean, but his badgering Zelenskyy to thank Tubby for his help drove it to the center of the earth.

The silver lining in that now more Americans will understand on a visceral level what a couple of ignorant, posturing assholes Trump and Vance are. The downside is that our country is now even more clearly aligned with aggressor Russia against its victim Ukraine, with SecDef “Glug Glug” Hegseth drawing down our cyber preparedness against Pal Putin. I knew this country was headed for the toilet, but goddamn, I didn’t realize how quick the plunge would come.

Anyway, you want some laughs? Here are two more REBID freebies: One in which Trump suffers from existential ennui, and resolves it by humiliating a subordinate; and a new installment of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, in which the Decision Desk experts agree that freedom of the press is one thing, but freedom from employment is quite another. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: TOP COPS ON THE TAKE EDITION.

This is my favorite version of this song. (This is #2.)

What’s new with the many-headed Hydra of American collapse? Along with the multiple plane crashes, we got new traitors and crackpots in the cabinet, the continuing rampage of DOGEbags through federal payment systems (and apparent compromise – or is it looting? -- of the U.S. Coast Guard payroll), and, most spectacularly, the Trump DOJ so very obviously extorting favors from the scumbag Mayor of New York that several top prosecutors have resigned rather than serve as accomplices to Deputy AG Emil Bove’s criminality. 

As has been noticed elsewhere, the New York case is very much worse than Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre – but it’s not hitting anywhere near as hard because now the Prestige Press is complicit, the Democratic Party is gutless, and, as a result of years of this shit, a hefty percentage of Americans can’t even agree that Crime Is Bad Even When Rich People Do It (nor can many of them, I would submit, tell time nor count past ten without taking their shoes off).

And that’s just the tippy-top of the headline list. Of particular interest to me is Tubby freezing the Associated Press out of the White House press pool because they won’t acknowledge his stupid “Gulf of America” tantrum in their style guide. And AP's alleged colleagues. who defended Fox News dipshits from Joe Biden's criticism, are not doing jack shit in solidarity. What are they afraid of? That they won't get tickets to the WHCA dinner? Or that they'll get barred from the White House press conferences -- which at this point are just pep rallies for Fat Hitler? No one there will tell any reporter anything useful in the public interest. Well, I guess the charade and humiliations are worth it just to keep their faces on TV so the public can see them as peers to Steve Doocy and Nick Fuentes.   

The first of our Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week (wow, slick transition) takes off from that appalling event, and gets into why these allegedly semantic disputes are no less important to resist than all their other brutality. 

The other unlocked REBID episode has to do with Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, and what the big boss’ first production might look like. (Features one of my acclaimed show-tune parodies!) While I am of course pissed off at the Soviet-style purge of the board and installation of himself and his flunkies (which, of course, the Prestige Press soft-pedals as “New board elects President Trump chair of Kennedy Center”), I foresee many opportunities for humor – like Tubby trying to get Cedric the Entertainer to join the Center’s long-running Sheer Madness. (“I just want you to do that Rosa Parks gag you did in that barber picture. Only we’re gonna give it a big build-up, see, also Candace Owens is your love interest.” “I keep telling you, my name is Tituss Burgess!” “No, you gotta use your stage name. That’s what draws the crowds.”) 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: KID'S GOT KILLER INSTINCTS EDITION.

Never knew this was written by Marc Campbell -- 
who also booked the old Rodeo Bar in New York! 
He recently passed: Nice appreciation here by the great Tim Stegall.

“Neighbor, how stands the Republic?” Fucked up and bullshit, Ben! The Muskbrats’ Rampage through federal data (including yours, and mine) seems to continue unabated, notwithstanding judges’ orders. The Muskbrats’  “investigations” into these systems are supposed to be in “read only” mode now, but since all Trump factota lie and crime all the time without ever facing meaningful consequences, why should we think they’ll stick to their word now? This is like waving the Beagle Boys into a bank vault and telling them, “remember – just look at the money, don’t take any!” 

(And now they’re plugging AI shit into the system – that always makes everything worse! )

Plus more grievous offenses that I have time or anti-nausea meds to contemplate, e.g.:

Just like calling them out as fascists, saying “the cruelty is the point” is something people used to think was going too far, once upon a time. Hard to believe now, isn’t it? Well, at least some Congressional Democrats are semi-erect, so maybe we’ll catch a break. 

Anyway, here are the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: First, the Diary of Daniel Penny – celebrity murderer turned venture capitalist! Once upon a time murdering unarmed black people just got you a following among a select group of scumbags – now it gets you a Presidential audience and a high-paying Wall Street gig for which you have no evident qualifications! Rightwing chucklefucks are already writing columns like “Critics mistake Daniel Penny for a DEI hire” which, lol:

Like the good investment firm that it is, Andreessen Horowitz is investing in the young man’s character. Perhaps it was his humility — Penny was relatively quiet during the trial, and has kept an impressively low profile since — his principles, his courage, or his risk-assessment that caught the firm’s eye.

Penny predicted that if he strangled a black busker for minutes on end until he died, he’d get off scot-free – which shows keen analytic skills! Plus when his lawyer told him to shut up, he listened! 

I will add that when you contemplate for even a minute that Penny, of West Islip, Long Island, got this gig and that it's much less easy to imagine George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse getting one like it, you will see something interesting about class in this country. 

The other freebie’s not as artful, but related, about whether their racism goes over less well than their fascism – that is, do normal people who may not get the whole “unaccountable government” thing nonetheless get that these guys are trying to kill trans people and bring back segregation? And that it’s a bad thing? I think so, but then I was assured the price of eggs was a big deal and the Prestige Press seems to think not, now that Tubby’s in power.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: DRUNK DRIVER NATION EDITION.

Seven years ago, can you believe it?

 Like Henry James said:

I find it such a mistake to have lived on -- when like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not into this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It throws back so livid a light – this was what we were so fondly working for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can.

Amen, Hank! Looks like I should have hitched a ride into oblivion with David Bowie. The country’s headed for the crapper so fast we can barely make out the milestones as we go. 

First there’s the criminality – bald, disgusting, ignored or soft-pedaled by the Prestige Press and complaisant Congressmembers alike. Was it really a week ago that Tubby illegally fired all those Inspectors General (and more recently had one dragged out of her office despite – I repeat – her firing being illegal)? Since then he and his goons have been criming to beat the band, most spectacularly by withholding trillions in duly appropriated federal funds, which he seems to be releasing slowly, piece by piece, after a slew of lawsuits. And now he’s apparently letting Elon Musk lay hands on government payment systems – obviously for no reason other than plain theft. 

This is not to speak of Trump’s usual stupid yammering outrages, as when he blamed the recent National Airport crash on black people and “dwarfism.” We’re often told that Tubby is working some kind of elaborate mind-game when he does shit like this, but I think it’s more simple: He’s a bigoted piece of shit from way back who long ago became adept at veiling his prejudices just enough to not get thrown off talk shows, but in his dotage he’s aware that new work-arounds have emerged and he wants to get in on them. So when the rightwing clowns who are really running his show report to him, all he really pays attention to, besides (of course) opportunities for grift, are the modish new disguises for slurs they’ve cooked up. He uses the DEI bullshit guys like Chris Rufo dish out the way Archie Bunker used to use Affirmative Action and Welfare Mothers – as humorous cover for his own stupidity. 

Hey, want some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down free issues? Who doesn’t? First, another NYT pratfall; second, another day at the fash factory with Tubby’s fave Hitler-lovin’ South African schnook. See ya next week (we should live so long)!

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: THE WEAK IN REVIEW EDITION.

Lou Rawls had some jams, I tell you what.

A gruesome week all around! You follow the news and know about Tubby’s inaugural rampage; if you need a reminder, this tally by Olivia Troye hits the high points and I’m sure there are other such lists out there you may consult. 

One thing Troye misses is Trump’s ongoing assault on the National Institutes of Health – freezing spending, communications, and really all their main work, leaving researchers and treating physicians “in limbo,” as Mother Jones puts it. The NIH is the most important medical research institution in the world.  Also, as some of you may know, the NIH has been very good to me as a patient – and, I have observed over thirty-plus years of visits to the Clinical Center, it has been good to patients and families from every part of the nation and every walk of life. So I take this very personally and if it were possible for me to despise these people any more than I already do I would. 

Since Troye wrote her roundup, there have been even more catastrophes – for example, there was this (in the Nixonian sense) Friday Night Massacre, as the New York Times reports:

President Trump fired 17 inspectors general, the internal watchdogs who monitor federal agencies, on Friday night, capping a week of dramatic shake-ups of the federal bureaucracy focused on loyalty to the president, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

As Chris Geidner points out, the Times does not mention that under the law Trump is required to give Congress 30 days notice to remove an IG. So, this is illegal – albeit, in the judgement of our Prestige Press, not as noteworthy as the Leader's “muscular” style of governance. 

A shiny new dime for the first Congressional Democrat to say so!  Alas, there seems to be a general agreement among most of them not to rock the boat because people might get mad at them for it. 

As for the Prestige Press, ha ha ha, don’t get me started. We’ve already dispensed with Megan McArdle’s Musk-Hitlergruß apologism. (There's more in the first of two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies -- yes, I'm embedding these now; follow along for more!) Now let’s look in on David Brooks. The dainty Times conservative lures liberals with a “How Trump Will Fail” headline, but the column is really about how Democrats should surrender:

Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the snooty elitists and the masses, I think we know how that’s going to turn out.

Tubby didn’t even get a majority of the popular vote, but Brooks acts (as does most of the Prestige Press) as if he’s an unstoppable juggernaut strongly supported by Joe Microbrew as he destroys public health and proposes to do away with FEMA – real bread-and-butter issues wimpy Democrats eschew in favor of the so-called “rule of law”! 

…If I were running the Democratic Party (God help them), I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.

In other words, get back to the previous forty years of neoliberal bullshit – we agree with your ends, comrade, it’s your means we question! It’s obviously worked out so well for America. 

Feral conservatives who do not have the same social anxieties as Brooks, and therefore no reason to pretend, are in hog heaven, for their inner wreckers have been validated and unleashed. The only complaint I’ve seen them make, via Abe Greenwald and Erick Erickson (UPDATE: And the Wall Street Journal editorial board), is about Tubby’s suspension of federal security details formerly afforded his erstwhile neocon advisors John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. (About his suspension of security for Anthony Fauci, who is at least as likely to be murdered by lunatics, they are silent and probably approving.) Imagine applauding a public official’s “muscular” actions against his enemies, then finding out that he’s also deliberately making your friends into sitting ducks for assassins, and not having the brains to figure out that the man is not your ally but a dangerous lunatic who could as easily turn his savagery on you. That’s American conservatism in the MAGA era. 

Oh, yeah, one more REBID freebie -- this one's not so serious: Since the Oscar nominations are out, I did a Fun Friday soliciting readers' nominations for Worst Best Picture of All Time. I picked mine, though there are many other worthy contenders. Enjoy! 

RETURN TO McARDLE.

I know for a while I haven't been doing this more than weekly as a round-up for Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (SUBSCRIBE, by the way -- what are ya saving your money for, think of what you're about to save on eggs!), but Reign of Tubby II is a target-rich environment so you may see more of me here in days to come, at least until I get thrown in a concentration camp.

There are plenty of horrors, Lord knows, like Trump following through on his promises to viciously attack his enemies -- e.g. immigrant families and the Constitution -- and playing Henry II to Bishop Mariann Budde's Thomas à Becket, etc.  While Elon Musk doing his Nazi salute is horrifying in its own way, you have to admit it's also funny -- this buffoon has all the money in the world, and still feels his best chance at having a lasting political impact is to make the President he paid for more obviously like Hitler. 

Grimly funny, too, are the candy-ass Prestige Press outlets trying desperately not to say his Nazi salute was a Nazi salute ("Ignites Online Speculation" Jesus Christ). But it ain't over till the fash lady sings -- Ladies and gents, Megan McArdle:

The logic is... not strong:

Take a decidedly nonracist acquaintance who was throwing a last-minute Halloween costume together from materials he had handy: a new white sheet set. Eschewing the cliché toga, he decided to dress up as a ghost. Only the sheet wasn't quite long enough when it was draped over his head, so he reached for the pillowcase ... and belatedly discovered, from the stunned silence of his fellow partygoers, that he had inadvertently dressed up as a Klansman.

This is how I can believe that Musk made a similar cognitive error.

Similarly, I tripped on a rock while naked and my penis just happened to enter this lady's vagina. These things happen! (Also I don't believe attendees of a McArdle party would be shocked by a klansman outfit, at least not if they knew one of their fellow chucklekfucks was inside it instead of, like, a poor person.)

Not gonna link but here's another gem from the trove:

As a general principle, when there is a plausible innocent explanation, I err on the side of believing it. This will strike many readers as willfully naive or perhaps a sign of my own Nazi tendencies.

Which is exactly what's wrong with our politics today.

If only you liberals were more generous about people, like Little Megan Sunshine! I suppose the only reason she didn't use "tolerant," the usual go-to for rightwingers trying to make lefties look mean, is that it would imply there was something to tolerate, when Musk was just being, you know, cognitively erroneous. 

Between this and McArdle's reliable defenses of her boss, her service to billionaires in need of an ego-stroke (and when are they not, these days?) assures that she'll have that Washington Post job until Peggy Noonan croaks and the Passive-Aggressive Conservative crown passes to her. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: FASH FORWARD EDITION.

Have we done this one before? Hell with it, it's nice.

Just a few words on David Lynch: Aside from the statements his films make, it may be his biggest achievement was breaking up our idea of movie time. All film directors play with time – film is almost like music that way – but when people talk about Lynch as “weird,” while they may be talking about the freakish people and creatures (rabbits, swaddled monster baby, whiteface Robert Blake and so on) I think they’re mostly responding to how his movies spool out rather than tell stories. Most of them barely have stories. They rely on tropes that we recognize from other movies -- the damsel in distress, the murder mystery, the haunted building, the couple on the run – on which Lynch hangs his visions and obsessions, and not on narrative as such. We hope to see the main characters elude or emerge from danger, but it’s seldom their heroic drive that gets them out, and often they just stay on that lost highway. And despite all the websites hunting down clues, his mysteries are never really solved. It’s very possible Lynch may not have even known who killed Laura Palmer when he set out on Twin Peaks. Many foreign directors had played around like this before, but Lynch had his own method and, more to the point, sold it to American audiences. (Part of the credit for that goes to another genius who’s still with us.)

Coffee break over, everyone back on your heads! Tubby grabs the wheel Monday, but like many of us I’ve been pre-gaming dread pretty heavily so it ought not to land so bad. (Also I won’t watch. Who needs it? I can read his yammerings later if the judgment of Clio demands.) Trump himself has been pretty quiet, but we already know from the statements of his flunkies and factota what a fash shambles to expect – as may be seen in the first of today’s FREE Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions, covering the cabinet nomination hearings for one of REBID’s stock characters, Fox News star Poopmouth.  Look, after Hegseth anything’s possible.

For the second freebie here’s a more serious-like essay on our feral billionaires, whose recent antics make Andrew Carnegie look like Francis of Assisi (and Carnegie was no Francis of Assisi). Everything bad about America has gotten worse, and the most obvious cause is rampaging capital; Reagan took the leashes off forty-five years ago and the moneyed went mad – though you may miss that they’re mad because, by the standard of self-enrichment, the only one they and our Prestige Press recognize, they’re perfectly rational. But if a man felt a chill and set fire to the whole neighborhood to warm himself you’d recognize the problem.  

OH, AND: I neglected to mention when it came out, but the great Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar wrapped 2024 with his usual Jon Swift Roundup -- a tradition begun by a late lamented comrade -- of several bloggers' favorite posts of the past year. They're all winners, of course, by some of the sharpest folks around, and if you haven't looked in on bloggers like Driftglass and Yastreblyansky and Mad Kane for a while, might I suggest you take the opportunity? And check your old rolodex -- hell, I just noticed Kip Manley is still in business! Now that vinyl and cassettes are back, maybe it's time blogs got on the retro rotation -- after all, the last time we were a hot commodity was when the country was in the grip of a madman -- if anyone's prepped for the coming catastrophe it's us! 

SPEAKING OF WHICH: In case you’re following me on social: Having abandoned Twitter months ago, this weekend I’m decommissioning my Meta accounts, i.e. Facebook and Instagram. (I may keep Messenger.) It’s not really a moral decision, though Zuckerberg's a moral disaster – I’m just sick of this shit. If you want to keep up I’m on Bluesky, and I’ve started to dabble in Spoutable and Pixelfed, all under @edroso. But I'm not sure how they'll pan out. You can always track my movements at edroso.com. Who knows what’s next. Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks, they won't help me survive. 

SUNDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: NEW FRONTIERS IN SANEWASHING EDITION.

Another one from the neo-soul coffee shop.

I keep filing these weekly dispatches late, due to my absurdly crowded work schedule; if you come across any of those liberal billionaires people keep asking to fund a Countervailing Noise Machine of the Left, tell them to send some o’ them sweet Sorosbucks my way -- my signal-to-noise ratio may be a little high for pure-propaganda purposes but just think of the cachet: “Yes, we fund Edroso. Doesn’t take much; poor fellow never had chance to develop a taste for luxury.” “What! Edroso’s still alive? I heard he perished from cirrhosis and a surfeit of bile.” “Good for you, keeping the old clown afloat. You know we ought to establish some sort of assisted-living for these bloggers – it reflects poorly on our Cause whenever one of them dies in a snowdrift.” 

Reciprocating this imaginary generosity, I bring you some freebies from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, my famous five-day-a-week Substack (subscriptions for which, by the way, are absurdly cheap and make great if puzzling “thinking of you” gifts). Here are two Scenes We’d Like To See: one, Jeff Bezos in Caligula mode, lamenting that his billions have not brought him fulfillment and seeking to fill the void with the corpse of democracy; and two, last week’s Tubby sketch, sort of “The Emperor’s New Depends.” If these don’t épater la bourgeoisie I daresay they can’t be épatered. 

If the satires seem a little nervier than usual, it’s because I look at the news, a filthy habit I can’t seem to shake. (Though I have fucked off from Twitter and will soon fuck off from Facebook as well – these days, the “long march through the institutions” is made mainly to sever connections with the most toxic ones, media-wise. Thankfully there are alternatives.) Many people have pointed out that Tubby’s stated plans of foreign conquest are nuts, and that the Prestige Press is sanewashing them in a manner that would be inexplicable if you hadn’t seen (and hasn’t everyone seen it, by now?) that they’re sucking up for access and protection, and (this is the worst part) out of belated recognition that fascism suits their business model better than truth-telling. The shittier ones are just full-on jingo cheering, while the polite ones are doing “analysis” like NPR’s “Is Trump's rhetoric on Greenland, Canada and Panama Canal a 'Madman Strategy'?”  which I expect to see followed by “Trump Biting Head Off Rat Sends a Signal: Experts.” 

Still more disgusting is Trump’s claim that California didn’t handle their UNPRECEDENTED CLIMATE-RELATED FIRE EMERGENCY correctly and promise to make it worse when he’s in power. I trust I don’t have to explain that this has nothing to do with any desire to help the people of that state and everything to do with his dark disinformation campaign to enrich himself by destroying the country; as I’ve been saying for years (and see Laura Jedeed for a newer, related angle), demonizing a state that actually generates economic growth and uses it to provide services to its people is necessary to the MAGA goal of making shitty, parsimonious Alabama-style governance the only kind his minions will ever know. I will also add that Steve Bannon bitching about Elon Musk is just fash fan-magazine bullshit and should not be taken seriously as anything but a further example of how stupid things have gotten. 

DAY OF WRECKONING

I could call this Friday-‘Round-the-Horn-Except-on-Monday, as I did last week, but I’m mainly here to tell you today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down is about the fourth anniversary of Tubby’s attempted coup, and that it’s free to non-subscribers.

I say my say there, with a few examples of the Jan. 6 gaslighting at overtly MAGA press outlets. (The Prestige Press outlets are mostly taking an “Ah! Well. Nevertheless” approach; NBC News lards some Jan. 6 facts into its report on today’s electoral college tally, but under the headline “Capitol heavily secured for election certification as Trump's Jan. 6 pardon plans remain largely a mystery” -- which is probably all most people will read, and which suggests that the event needs “heavy” protection in case of an attack by ravening mobs of Kamala Harris supporters, since, you know, Everything is Bothsides now.)

Speaking of Bothsides, I will mention this lulu I found today, from Minnesota Public Radio: “Jan. 6 still divides people. Is there a productive way to move past it?” If you smell professional difference-splitters, collect your winnings: in this case, it’s Bill Doherty from Braver Angels (formerly Better Angels), and his response to the question “why is this issue so fraught?” is… well, have a look:

If you believe that the election was stolen and that there were people there to protest … you’re sympathetic with them. You’re thinking that this is what democracy is about. You say, “Well, 90 percent of the people were perfectly fine.” On the other hand, if you think their cause was not just, you understandably focus not on the folks who just went home, but on the people who attacked the Capitol.

A few bad apples! The solution, says Doherty, is “not to argue about the past when people’s minds are made up” – let’s not bicker and argue about who insurrected who! – “but to talk about how would we go forward.” Of course “we” in this case is a bunch of people meeting in gyms and conference rooms that are nowhere near the levers of power, which in a few weeks will be in the tight grip of people who think insurrection is great when they do it and ever better if it works – and, having gotten away with their last attempt, will not scruple to try another if things aren’t going their way; JD Vance ain’t Mike Pence. Stay strong, y’all, and don't let them tell you shit is Shinola.