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On this blog, to explain the midterms, we draw on the wisdom of Frank Zappa, who famously asked…

”What’s the ugliest part of your body?

What’s the ugliest part of your body?

Some say your nose

Some say your toes

But I think it’s your mind…”

*************************

I think we are witnessing, to alter a famous title, The Closing of the Mentally Ill American Mind.

I think a large majority of the country is finally actionably creeped out by the cerebral twistedness of the Republican right.

Consider John Kennedy of Louisiana, a loyal Trump man in the Senate. Consider his many hebephrenic voicings. “You make me want to throw up in my mouth,” he said to Jack Smith during a hearing. In a recent interview about the midterms, he said, “A smart man washes his hands after he urinates. A wise man doesn’t urinate on his hands. We need to stop urinating on our hands.”

No one knows what these statements mean. Jack Smith, hearing a Senator confess to him that he wanted to vomit in his own mouth, said nothing. Nor does anyone know what Kennedy’s statements about urinating on your hands means. Maybe he meant to say urinating in your mouth.

Everyone, however, knows the marks of a truly disordered and repellent mind. It’s like that famous scene in The Snake Pit when Olivia de Havilland, surrounded by madwomen saying mad things, suddenly realizes she doesn’t belong in the madhouse — that she may be troubled, but she is not insane like the people around her. “You’re getting better,” her psychiatrist tells her.

We’re getting better. We’re getting out of the snake pit.

Margaret Soltan, November 13, 2026 2:47PM
Posted in: democracy

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One Response to “On this blog, to explain the midterms, we draw on the wisdom of Frank Zappa, who famously asked…”

  1. Stephen Karlson Says:

    The senator is telling an old joke, set in the restroom of an athletic club or the like. Yale man finishes his business, heads out. Harvard man harrumphs, “at Harvard we learned to wash our hands when we took a leak,” and the Yalie’s riposte is “At Yale we learned how not to pee on our hands.”

    Substitute collegiate or sports rivalries to taste.

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