A Missouri psychotic named Greitens

Has watched as his Senate race tightens

He beats up his son

He threatens with guns

And Republican voters are frightened

An observer is stunned at evidence that profoundly influential studies of depression and Alzheimer’s may have been shown to be bogus.

But he’s wrong about the “producing no results.” The serotonin thing has resulted in tens of millions of Americans being put on powerful, very hard to withdraw from, meds – meds which probably are not responsible for whatever alleviation of their condition these people may be experiencing.

Hawley Concerned That Being a Coward

Is Overshadowing His Work as a Fascist

… and every day will be … Sunday? Monday? Funday? … No! GUNday.

“[G]oing berserk with guns has become an American way of life.“

And it’s only lunchtime. Stay tuned.

Even if you haven’t read the novel, you’ve learned a lot about it, and DeLillo’s world view, just from reading this blog, which after all has a whole category devoted to DeLillo. The Noah Baumbach production opens August 31 at the Venice Film Festival.

A Bronx-born son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo is an entirely urban animal, yet he knowledgeably sets his novel in a small midwestern “village” (I’ll explain the quotation marks in a moment); a writer who has never had children, he sensitively places at the heart of the book the character and fate of many children in a blended family (their parents are much-divorced). As with many of my posts on the postmodern way of death, the novel first establishes the enviably, pleasantly, eventlessly “immune” life of affluent Americans, and then throws a lethal environmental catastrophe (“the airborne toxic event”) right in their faces. And lungs.

So DeLillo locates the Gladney family (glad; bland) in the cute village of Blacksmith, with its preserved nineteenth century main street and vernacular library and town hall and churches…

From its sweet pre-industrial name to its charming brick storefronts, Blacksmith could convince you you really are living a pre-modern life, before advanced technology, massive shopping malls, and endless ubiquitous streaming media; but, as White Noise makes hilariously clear, it’s all a simulacrum, a Truman-show facade behind which lies, like it or not, the late twentieth century.

When the disaster hits, Gladney’s first response is total denial:

“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornadoes. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”

The filmmakers chose Wellington, Ohio for their Blacksmith – a heartland town whose preserved main street has won national awards.

The cast?

A vote for Gov Gregory Abbott

Endangers your vibrator rabbit

Surrender your dildo

Your misery will grow

Vote Beto! and keep to your habit

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

Really – the race is as tight as a Kegel exercise. Now’s the time to give Beto money.

No kidding. We wuz robbed Trump has transexualized into Ada Doom, the batty granny in Cold Comfort Farm, who obsessively says: I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I saw something nasty in the election returns.

This blog therefore now officially drops the moniker we have long given Trump, inspired by what Nicolae Ceaușescu insisted he be called — The Genius of the Carpathians — and adopts a new one: Ada Doom.

Government lawyers also intend to ask the judge to remove Christine Jorgensen, Kemal Atatürk, Carly Simon, Eric Satie, and Damien Thorn from the list of people Trump is suing.

You probably don’t think it’s worth your while to read, in depth, the self-defense of the rioters, but, for pure amusement, this is a good read.

… that this nation’s first case of polio in many years originated in an ultraorthodox Jewish sect. The Times of Israel summarizes:

Young man who recently got married is suffering from paralysis; was not vaccinated; is a resident of Rockland County, which has a history of low vaccine compliance

The story is getting wide coverage. What it represents is the shame of a nation. A modern, enlightened country like the US should see no polio at all, since any outbreak is the result of absolutely basic disregard of personal and civic health norms.

Imagine: A highly contagious disease like that lurking, and a community’s indifference to basic science and the well-being of its children allows people to go unvaccinated. It’s of a piece with these same communities refusing to educate their children to national standards, breaking tax laws, and breaking non-discrimination laws. Not to mention refusing vaccines for other easily avoided scourges.

The new polio case comes amid fierce backlash against vaccination in some Orthodox communities fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and following a measles outbreak in Rockland County in 2018 and 2019 that was centered in the area’s Haredi Orthodox population.

The New York Times:

[This] community was also a nexus of a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, with hundreds of cases in the county and in Brooklyn, which is also home to many Orthodox residents. Rockland County’s rate of polio vaccination for small children is significantly lower than the rate for other counties outside of New York City, according to state data.

These communities, which voted at a higher percentage for Trump than any other community in America, and which sent busloads of community members to, er, various January 6 events in Washington (the insurrection was one of the very few places on earth where you could watch ultraorthodox Jews and neo-Nazis cavorting together), will fight national authorities tooth and nail if any government agency actually tries to make them behave. We have already witnessed, in the streets of New York, how shockingly violent they can be.

Indeed these are the Trumpian shock troops, communities of people who recognize that Trump’s violent nihilism is their own. If government has any defensive purpose at all, it is to respond to the threat profoundly non-compliant sects like this one represent.

Klobuchar wonders how the violence at the Capitol would have been handled if we’d had a president “who didn’t flaunt the laws of the United States.”

As Vocabulary.com notes, “Flaunt is to show off, but flout is to ignore the rules.”

She’s forgiven because it’s way easy to confuse these two very similar words; and also because she’d make a damn good presidential candidate and I don’t want to discourage her.

A policeman brutally beaten by the insurrectionists shares his thoughts on Josh “He’s A Runner” Hawley.

Sing it:

He’s a runner
and he’ll run away
soon there’ll be no Josh
courage ain’t been born
that can make him stay
Hawley get away while you can

He’s a runner
and he’ll run away
with police escort
courage ain’t been born that
can make him stay
come his Proud Boys mob
come the coup
he’s a runner

There’ll come the runnin’
He’ll know he’s got to
don’t ask him not to or why
Oh why oh why did you
run off
and leave Oath Keepers cryin’
now they’re in jail
and you’re not

In the U.S., the urgent desire to stop mass shootings — and gun violence in general — is met with almost total refusal in conservative state legislatures to pass laws or restrictions that make careless gun ownership a crime. “I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that’s very encouraging,” says Allison Anderman, director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center. Meanwhile, 4.6 million children live in homes where loaded firearms are unlocked; a 2021 survey showed that 70 percent of parents believe they have sufficiently secured their weapons, while a third of their adolescent kids say they can find them within five minutes. In 2020, 4,368 kids died of gunshot wounds in America, making it the leading cause of childhood death. A third of these were suicides.

Well hello Hawley! Yes, hello Hawley!

It’s so nice to see you break out in a run.

You’re looking swell, Hawley. Run like hell, Hawley.

Harmless tourists in the Capitol are so much fun.

You feel the room swayin’

While the mob’s sayin’

“After Pence we hang the others one by one.”

So pump your fist, fella

You’re a Proud Boys Nelson Mandela

Hawley you’ve showed your courage once again!