… one of four stops on today’s Chesapeake Bay adventure,

… something stirred in UD’s headlet, and she searched the name Junod on University Diaries.

Sure enough, back in 2010, she cited Junod’s smart remarks about her beloved Don DeLillo; and one of those remarks has now helped her think about the Black Rifle Coffee/Dallas Cowboys controversy – a controversy that doesn’t seem to be dying down.

No, [DeLillo] has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque…

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.

Black Rifle, with its bloody brews (Murdered Out; AK-47), is corporatized violence becoming – via the Dallas Cowboys – a way of thinking and talking; a part of the landscape. What Brooks misses in his analysis of the origins and motivations of our teen massacrists is this normalization, this banality if you will, of apocalyptic weaponry and what it is doing to us. Coffee – that most banal of drinks – is now visually (via advertising footage, endlessly recycled) wedded to mass slaughter, to weapons that can literally murder us out.

An AK-47, first encountered by kids on a Jumbotron at a cool, fun, wholesome Dallas Cowboys game, is something that gives you the same vague chemical kick as a cup of Joe or a sports event. Everybody’s doin’ it.

Our violent psychotics do not necessarily, as Brooks argues, regard their AK-47s (often bought for them by daddy — Brooks has far too little to say about the depraved parents/suppliers of our killers) as charismatic icons of power and vengeance. They more probably seem to them utililtarian, normalized (how outlaw can AK-47s be when you get them from daddy, and when everyone’s drinking AK-47 coffee?), parts of the landscape.

Thus when Brooks gets melodramatically Biblical about guns (“The guns are like serpents in the trees, whispering to them.”), I wonder if he’s headed in the wrong direction. How can guns have this effect when dad’s chipped coffee cup has images of AK-47s all over it? When American parents routinely receive marketing pressing them to buy baby versions of AK-47s for their eight year old? When the raffle prize at the county fair is an AK-47?

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Our country’s most outspoken, violent teenager, after all, is famous for having boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and it would only intensify his supporters’ enthusiasm for him. He didn’t know how right he was. Even his reported excitement about the impending death of his vice-president did nothing to dislodge him from his position of undisputed king of the nation’s Republican Party. His sons are even more violent – in word and deed – than he; and his congressional spawn … How surprised are you going to be when Jim Jordan can’t take it anymore and blasts into the January 6 committee room with a – you know – in his grip?

Go ahead. Laugh at this scenario. Go ahead.

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Just as the handgun has become the home appliance of choice when you want to grab something to kill yourself with in this, our massively suicide-ridden land, so the AK-47 is simply there, part of the landscape, the thing you grab (dad’s far too ruggedly independent to lock it up) when your loathing of humanity reaches – let’s go with coffee – the boiling point. “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” and only America goes a step further than flooding the country with guns for absolutely everyone and electing a pathologically violent president: America makes guns cute and sassy and savory, an unremarkable part of our shared corporate advertising world.

Filthy stupid yahoos who give the whole enterprise a really bad look.

… U.S. News & World Report announced that it had “unranked” Columbia University, which had been in a three-way tie for the No. 2 spot in the 2022 edition of Best Colleges, after being unable to verify the underlying data submitted by the university…

The Ivy League university said then that it would not participate in the next rankings because it was investigating accusations by one of its own mathematics professors that the No. 2 ranking was based on inaccurate and misleading data.

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Background.

“We deserve a better class of bastards,”[said a British commentator about Boris Johnson].

We all do. Still, as an American, I have to say: Be thankful for what you’ve got.

It’s called HANDMADE SHOTGUN, in honor of the shooter who killed Shinzo Abe.

A spokesman for Black Rifle Coffee explained: “He made his own shotgun. Cool.”

… all nations – even Japan, with its incredibly low gun ownership/gun death rates – will have to assume that a madman with a gun lurks somewhere at even modestly significant public events.

If this can happen in Japan, it can happen anywhere. Grim as it is, public officials in most of the world are going to need American-level security, or something close to it. The guns have won.

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The killings used to creep up on you, didn’t they? A mall shot up in Copenhagen, a woman walking her baby on the upper east side shot pointblank in the head… You take each instance in (keeping vaguely in mind, to be sure, that in places like Chicago and Tijuana everybody’s shooting everybody else to death day and night) and there’s a shudder and a disbelief and a disgust and then you move on. Only gradually does it occur to you that it’s now everywhere and all the time – the bangbangbang of people killing other people with guns. The panic my friend Steve experienced when he realized his wife was on the same street as the shooter here in DC, on Upper Connecticut Avenue… When I heard his voice on the phone hours after the shooter killed himself — that was I guess the moment for me. No more waving off all the gun killing as somehow peripheral to me. What world do I think I’m living in?

What a poor sport this newswoman is. (Scroll down for the video.) She actually cited the astounding suicide-by-gun statistic among veterans – the very group the Dallas Cowboys claim to be helping by promoting blood-soaked Black Rifle Coffee.

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There are now reports that the Cowboys are about to announce a second coffee partnership, this one with CTE Coffee, the brew for people who love football-induced neurodegenerative disease. Each flavor is named after a dead CTE sufferer – Jovan Belcher, Dave Duerson, Frank Gifford, Aaron Hernandez, Junior Seau – and each features a graphic of their pockmarked postmortem brains. Strong stuff, you say? You betcha! The Cowboys are calling CTE America’s Brew cuz no one does lethal head blows the way we do! If you don’t like it, move to North Korea.

[Trump] is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I’m genuinely asking…

Mark Leibovich continues:

[Lindsay Graham] could not believe what Trump could get away with. It created a mystique, especially among politicians, who tend to be rule-bound by nature and chronically petrified of being exposed as frauds. Trump had no such fear of rules or capacity for embarrassment. He was a pure and feral rascal…

My mind roils with thought experiments of what else Republicans could tolerate from him: What if Mike Pence had been hanged? One would hope it would have been disqualifying, but who knows?

And don’t forget: There’s a good chance a family just like this lives in your town!

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A Glock for my favorite psychotic

Now that you’ve turned fifteen!

Just like the dad of Kip Kinkel

I’m proud of my own string bean!

[I’ve] seen dozens of other young men stay sober & become fruitful members of society, [so] these are not the only two options.

There are tens of thousands of stories like this one – ordinary Americans defending themselves — in this case, from the government trying to get between a boy and his dog — with their weapons. They do it to preserve the freedom to live as they wish. Bravo, young man.

[T]he most impressive achievement [Alabama Senator Richard] Shelby leaves behind is the military-industrial complex he supplied with lavish federal aerospace and defense contracts in Alabama’s 5th Congressional district, which sent [Mo] Brooks to Washington to chew off the “Big Government” hand that fed it. The local monument to the senator’s powerful career is the Shelby Center for Science and Technology at the University of Alabama Huntsville. The building is best known as the scene of the 2010 mass shooting in which Amy Bishop, a biology professor denied tenure, pulled a semi-automatic pistol out of her purse during a faculty meeting and executed three colleagues (she pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence).

On the bipartisan gun-safety bill recently signed into law, Shelby voted against even sending it to the Senate floor, leaving his A+ NRA rating unbloodied.

Shelby’s presumptive successor is of course a champion of the “God-given Second Amendment,” but she also sells herself as a “Mama on a mission.” To a future Senator [Katie] Britt, that means that “our children should be taught to love this country” — a nation so exceptional that our children die at their school desks in order to preserve our freedoms.

Even so, it don’t seem fair that respectable publications like Newsweek run articles sayin we gonna run our bloodhounds up down and all ’round the coochees of … certain people as they attempt to exit the state at transportation hubs. This scurrilous claim has been fact checked and is not true.

Let’s set things straight: The real story is that the state has set up a so-called WAND SQUAD composed of legislators, stationed at airports and train stations, who will be empowered to insert transducers into certain people. But never fear! They will definitely be using probe gel.

You go, Mom!