I don’t know what category this is. I just feel compelled to keep you updated on The American Story.

1.) Nantucket. Headline.

Nantucket Man Who Chopped Down Neighbor’s Trees for Ocean View Says He Was Simply ‘Clearing Out Her Crappy Trees’

In preparation for selling his neighboring house, Jonathan Jacoby walked over to Patricia Belford’s place and cut down sixteen trees her family planted fifty years ago. He did this to be able to say in his listing that his house had water views, which allowed him to put a big price on it.

Belford will win her lawsuit against him, but Jacoby doesn’t care. I’m sure he’s done the math. Reparations in this matter will result in a sum far less than what he’ll get for the house; and even if they don’t, he’s astronomically rich, so he doesn’t give a shit about massive outlays.

The important thing, for him, is the opportunity to express earth-core-deep contempt for everyone and for everything.

2.) Hamptons. Headline.

Everyone’s Suing Everyone Out East. Forget golf. The real local pastime is spending millions of dollars to win zoning wars.

The article is a cavalcade of people exactly like Jacoby.

The village government … granted [one owner] permission to clear some phragmites, a type of invasive grass, on the condition that he replace them with native vegetation. Instead, [he] clear-cut much of the land around the house and put in a floating dock and a kayak rack. He built white concrete patios on two sides, enlarging the house’s coverage area by thousands of square feet. He replaced the pool shed with a pergola and outdoor shower... [The same owner decades ago] notoriously demolished four Times Square buildings in the dead of night, to head off a moratorium on tearing down SROs, for which he paid millions in fines...

 [S]ometimes a [local attorney’s] client who wants something that requires a zoning-board approval will ask him, “Why shouldn’t I just do it?” He discourages that path as “very, very, very risky.” You might get away with it, but if you want to sell the place, some East End municipalities have ordinances requiring that you secure a new certificate of occupancy from their buildings department before a deed can be transferred. If an inspection turns up unauthorized alterations, you could find yourself stuck. This is the bind [this owner, who now cannot sell his house,] is in.

But for this person, as for Jacoby, the real point is to leave an empty rotting caught up in litigation house out there in order to convey earth-core-deep contempt for everyone and for everything. Remember that blank look on Bernie Madoff’s face as he explained that he didn’t really know why he stole sixty billion dollars from people? That’s the look on the facades of these houses: I am a monument to motiveless limitless existence-hatred.

Another owner built

 a chicken coop and other animal enclosures without permits. A children’s playhouse popped up near the fruit orchard. And a couple days before Christmas, the neighbors noticed that four alpacas had appeared like fuzzy magi. [They] surreptitiously recorded all these developments in snapshots and video clips… One of the videos showed [the owner’s] children chasing the alpacas around the reserve in an ATV. [One neighbor,] who had paid $4.6 million for a house next to the farm, filed dozens of photos with the town-planning department, scrawled with handwritten notations like “more waste and debris” and “2 years of Porta Potty.” [The owner] complained to the town about the invasion of his privacy, filing affidavits that accused [this neighbor] of harassing his laborers by filming them through her privet hedge. “Why is the manure structure so near my property,” [another neighbor] wrote to the zoning board. “I am very concerned about the odors which most certainly will deny my quiet enjoyment of my home for which I paid millions of dollars.”

This example literalizes the Madoffian I Shit in Your Face, World, and I Don’t Know Why philosophy.

Think, mes petites, how strange it is! Punishment, even with all their money and countersuits, is often immense, yet the death drive, the shit drive, the I’ll destroy you all and I’ll destroy myself drive, is so strong that it doesn’t care.

After breaking rule after rule to get a breakfast nook he wanted, an indignant Carl Icahn sued the town for having the gall to tell him to take it down.

Icahn sued in New York State court, and when he lost, he went on to appeals that have yet to be resolved, all so he could keep his 400-square-foot breakfast nook.

This example highlights the Ubu-infantility at work among the Madoffians. I’m suing! It’s taking many years and I keep losing but again the point as UD has been trying to explain is I’m so rich there’s nothing to be done but to kill everybody.

Maybe we’re all, at our idiest-core, infantile (me play big boy tennis!), vindictive, suicidal, and homicidal, like super-rich King Ubu. What’s special about our country’s Madoffians (the upcoming link is to the NYC residence of one of the Hamptons owners described in this post) is that they get to stage their psychoses.

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Roger Shattuck on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…

Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

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Poetic Addenda:

each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it

and pretty soon you get to like those jolts,

you and millions of other dolts who like to be electrocuted

by their own feelings

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I want to date-rape life