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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"What began with a puckered asshole descending a gilt escalator in New York..."
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Michael Weiss
@michaeldweiss
My latest: "What began with a puckered asshole descending a gilt escalator in New York ended with his lawyer ranting next door to a 10th-rate merchant of buttplugs in Philadelphia."
The Spectacle of Trumps Unsuccess | Newlines Magazine
That Americas first authoritarian commander-in-chief appears to be going out as Richard III directed by Corky St. Clair is a relief, but its also a testament to just how nourished Trump has been...
newlinesmag.com
9:48 AM · Nov 11, 2020
Michael Weiss
@michaeldweiss
My latest: "What began with a puckered asshole descending a gilt escalator in New York ended with his lawyer ranting next door to a 10th-rate merchant of buttplugs in Philadelphia."
The Spectacle of Trumps Unsuccess | Newlines Magazine
That Americas first authoritarian commander-in-chief appears to be going out as Richard III directed by Corky St. Clair is a relief, but its also a testament to just how nourished Trump has been...
newlinesmag.com
9:48 AM · Nov 11, 2020
Edit to add
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-spectacle-of-trumps-unsuccess/
What began with a puckered asshole descending a gilt escalator in New York ended with his lawyer ranting next door to a 10th-rate merchant of buttplugs in Philadelphia. As far as American about-faces go, its about as good as we could expect and arguably better than we deserve. Its also why fears of a Trumpist seizure of power seem unfounded. The pantomimic attempts at one are all so pathetic and ridiculous that even the incumbents most fanatical base seems too demoralized and spent to take them either literally or seriously.
Satisfying expectation, Donald Trump has so far failed to concede an election he insists he won by a lot even though he lost it resoundingly. He says there is evidence of widespread ballot fraud when the federal election commissioner has stated there is not. Apparatchiks in the GOP have either kept quiet, as wary and spent parents witnessing their toddler cycle through a temper tantrum might, or theyve taken to the airwaves to demand that Joe Bidens clear and unambiguous victory be deferred until all the lawsuits the Trump campaign has filed are adjudicated. This, in spite of the fact that the 10 lawsuits already filed have been dismissed by judges and credible reporting suggests the money raised to handle any more is really going to pay off outstanding campaign debts.
The long con continues, even if its dupes cant quite keep up their end of the bargain anymore. MAGA mobs mobilized to terrorize vote-counters in Maricopa County, Arizona, vanished within 24 hours, according to a BuzzFeed journalist. In a nation bitterly divided, it seems, the bitterest still have better things to do for the weekend. True, the rest of the very online base continues to fulminate at Fox News, which called Arizona for Biden early, before the other networks did. Now, the diehards say, they will only watch OANN or Newsmax for their alternate facts, making Rupert Murdoch the unlikeliest enemy of the people of this new age of paranoia. And yet, according to the latest Reuters/IPSOS poll, a whopping 80 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believe Biden won. The other 20 percent are on Parler.
Exiled Thucydides knew, W.H. Auden famously intoned upon Hitlers invasion of Poland, All that a speech can say/About Democracy. Yeah, well, exiled Thucydides never had to listen to Rudy Giuliani deliver a speech suggesting democracy has just been stolen through necromancy. Joe Frazier is still voting here, Americas Mayor told a confused press scrum in the parking lot of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping concern on Saturday afternoon, in one of the scruffier districts of the City of Brotherly Love. Also, Will Smiths father voted here twice since he died. I dont know if Rudy said this before or after he introduced a convicted pedophile sex offender to affirm that a coup was indeed underway in the nation, but it doesnt matter.
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"What began with a puckered asshole descending a gilt escalator in New York..." (Original Post)
Nevilledog
Nov 2020
OP
LakeArenal
(28,817 posts)1. A puckered asshole and his purchased Russian asset.
Mike 03
(16,616 posts)2. If anybody is unfamiliar with the Auden/Thucydides reference...
(I had to look it up)
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave ...
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave ...
Thucydides was unjustly exiled from democratic Athens for a military failure, at which he point he wrote his great history of the Peloponnesian War that contains Pericles paean to democracy (the strongest pro-democratic statement of ancient times). Thucydides probably presents Pericles speech ironically. He implies that it is propaganda; in fact, self-interest explains all politics. Thucydides, Auden thinks, analyzed all in his book
/ The habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement and grief.
In stanza 4, we are back in New York, where blind skyscrapers reach into the neutral air. One sense of neutral may be political: the United States is neutral in the war, hence at peace, but also complicit because we do nothing to stop Hitler. Auden is a citizen of a combatant nation who is guiltily safe in neutral Manhattan. Neutrality had been a characteristic failure of the low dishonest decade that Auden invoked in the first stanza. The Western democracies chose to be neutral in the Spanish Civil War, which made them complicit to fascist rule. Most of New Yorks blind skyscrapers house private enterprises, ostensibly free and private, but Auden compares them to the grandiose structures of Berlin and Moscow. New Yorks buildings, too, use / their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man. The ideology that drives them is presumably imperialism, a mirror for the ideologies of Europe.
In stanza 4, we are back in New York, where blind skyscrapers reach into the neutral air. One sense of neutral may be political: the United States is neutral in the war, hence at peace, but also complicit because we do nothing to stop Hitler. Auden is a citizen of a combatant nation who is guiltily safe in neutral Manhattan. Neutrality had been a characteristic failure of the low dishonest decade that Auden invoked in the first stanza. The Western democracies chose to be neutral in the Spanish Civil War, which made them complicit to fascist rule. Most of New Yorks blind skyscrapers house private enterprises, ostensibly free and private, but Auden compares them to the grandiose structures of Berlin and Moscow. New Yorks buildings, too, use / their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man. The ideology that drives them is presumably imperialism, a mirror for the ideologies of Europe.
An essay here:
https://peterlevine.ws/?p=9468
That helped it make sense... and it was interesting.