Moody and by accounts of his advisers sometimes depressed, the president barely shows up to work… “If there are these analogies between classic literature and society as it’s operating right now, then that should give us some big cause for concern this December,” said [a literature] scholar. “We’re approaching the end of the play here and that’s where catastrophe always comes.”

Okay, so what’s the catastrophe? Certainly we’ve all allowed ourselves to think of geopolitical disaster as a paranoid depressive conjuring revenge pads about the White House … But – to alter one of George’s famous remarks to Martha – “In reality it usually works out that the nature of the calamity is more private.”

Which is to say, we’re back at UD‘s Trump-may-commit-suicide theory.

I mean, if you want to talk about Shakespeare as a Trump template, which the NYT writer does, suicide is all over the place, ain’t it? There’s a serious effort at suicide in Lear; Hamlet famously goes on and on about whether he should bother existing, and of course Ophelia does the deed; Lady Macbeth apparently offs herself. Ditto Othello…. Go here for the full, long, list. Why offer an analysis of the Last Days of Trump featuring Shakespearean tragedy and unnamed “catastrophe” and not go there? THE Shakespearean catastrophe is suicide.

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Yes, UD still puts the likelihood of Trump doing (or attempting) it at maybe ten percent.

But if he does do it, it will be – in line with his whole life as a showman – a lollapalooza.

Rumor has it he plans to “leave the White House on January 20 in Marine One, then take Air Force One to Florida, where he would address supporters at a rally timed to coincide with Biden’s socially distanced inauguration outside the US Capitol.“

At this rally, he will ascend a massive golden escalator — larger and more glittering than the one he descended on the day he announced his presidential run. As he gradually rises, flames will begin to shoot out from the sides of the moving stairway, and the crowd will go wild as screaming fireworks also appear. But instead of the national anthem they expect to hear, it’s… the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde?

And here at the very top of the escalator appears La Pasionaria, Trump’s true spiritual mate all along, Lara Trump, halo’d in gold. She sings:

In the wafting universe of the World-Breath

Drown, be engulfed…

As they clasp, they expire.

Laid low by covid, Giuliani (with the president’s blessing) has designated “Mr 7-7-7” as the new head of the president’s election fraud team.

… than your blogueuse, every now and then she becomes oddly inspired and does something like this.

… looks like a nineteenth century landscape painting. Like the other garden photo a couple of posts down, this was taken early on this late autumn morning, with the sun already up and doing its thing.

It all made me think of the poem “Sunlight on the Garden.”

Look. The Republicans are doing their bit to undermine the election for Republicans, so that’s all good. But Democrats can’t take anything for granted. UD has been contributing to Jon Ossoff’s campaign for some time; she likes him, and she likes the fact that he’s part of the effort to flip the Senate.

At the moment, polls have him looking very good indeed.

… UD‘s garden, after a night of wind and rain.

Once an obscure school, Edinburg now captures the world’s attention with its football program’s amazing, award-winning defensive end, who … well, the thing that caught the world’s eye was his vicious attack on a referee who did something he didn’t like. But let’s roll the whole tape.

Edinburg High senior defensive end Emmanuel Duron, the team’s star defender, was flagged on a play early during the second quarter after he shoved an opposing offensive lineman to the ground and attempted to make a tackle on PSJA High freshman quarterback Jaime Lopez after the whistle had blown the play dead.

Duron and referee Fred Gracia exchanged words after the play was over, and Gracia ejected Duron from the contest after back-to-back unsportsmanlike penalties on the same play.

Duron, who was leading the Bobcats in tackles (102) and sacks (eight) through four games, then charged onto the field as teammates raced after him in an attempt to hold him back. The senior defensive end collided with Gracia, checking him chest-to-chest at full speed and sending him to the turf.

Duron was escorted out from the stadium by a team of four Edinburg police officers who were working security for the game. He was not handcuffed, but was removed from the premises and did not return.

… Duron was suspended for the remainder of the 2019-20 soccer season after a similar incident occurred during a match on the pitch last year against crosstown rival Edinburg Vela.

Duron was The Monitor’s All-Area Boys Wrestler of the Year last season.

You’ll note that I linked you to local coverage up there. Here’s Emmanuel Duron’s current Google News page. He and his school have really hit the big time.

I linked you to local stuff because in order to understand the sort of world that generates and lionizes notoriously violent eighteen year olds, you need to understand Texas. Everyone else headlines this story with words like violent, disgusting, shocking; the local press doesn’t even make reference to the assault.

Bittersweet: Bobcats beat

Bears for 6A playoff berth,

lose star defender

The most important thing, the headline thing, is that his team won; but the victory was “bittersweet” because they “lost” their “star defender.” No explanation of how they lost him.

First two paragraphs:

The Edinburg High Bobcats and PSJA High Bears met Thursday night at Richard R. Flores Stadium to play a win-or-go-home District 31-6A zone play-in game that started off with a frenetic pace.

But the moment was bittersweet for the Bobcats, who lost their best defensive player during a 35-21 victory over PSJA High to advance to the Class 6A Division I playoffs, after an ugly moment during the first half threatened to derail the entire game.

So the lead is that the game had a good fast pace, and that tragically one side’s best defensive player was “lost.” But they won anyway! The still unspecified event that prompted the loss almost derailed the game… And an assault on a ref followed by four police officers dragging the player from the field would certainly derail a game anywhere outside of Texas; but why not take advantage of the points your side made as a result of the unhinged physical attacks and the cheating of your most admired player?

Oh, the article goes on to recount the attack; but look at the whole thing. Almost all of it is taken up with fans’ excited accounts of the win.

This blog has long covered our most revered college football players – the crazed giants led by Richie Incognito. Duron is king of the Edinburg world and will soon be fought over by recruiters from all the big football universities. He will soon be king of the world.

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PS: I’m always astounded at the fragile sensibilities of sportswriters. These guys are blown away (“unreal,” one of them writes) when violence like this happens on the field. Someone needs to tell them that it’s routine. German soccer officials get bodyguards.

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UPDATE: The school has withdrawn altogether from the playoffs and has apologized profusely. It’s a start. But the district faces a world of pain. Litigation. The worst imaginable global publicity. Huge money awards. Plus questions as to why their Incognito-in-Training wasn’t removed from football, given that he’d already been removed from soccer. Did the school think a differently shaped ball would mean different behavior? The sports-mad folk of Texas have a great deal to answer for, in so many respects. This is merely the latest disgrace.

Another Update: “Duron was charged with assault in Edinburg Municipal Court, a class A misdemeanor. If convicted, the charge is punishable by up to one year in county jail and a fine of up to $4,000.” That’s the least of his and his school’s problems. Because of the global attention to the case if nothing else (and he may have prior arrests/convictions), he’s liable to get some jail time; the school district may face an expensive lawsuit. It seems especially damaging and unfortunate for the particular school (coach, principal) that Duron was allowed to keep playing. Brace yourself for lurid tales of his off-field violence from friends and teammates.

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Mugshot. Adorable I’ll fuck you up too motherfucker expression on the lad’s face.

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MORE: And here’s what the players – gathering, with LET US PLAY signs in their hands, for a protest in front of the administration building – don’t get. It seems obvious to them – and to a lot of other reasonable people – that collective punishment is unfair. THEY didn’t attack the game official.

But they are in fact a collective, and collectively they represent a school, a school district, a town, even a local culture. What happened on their football field was grotesque — so grotesque that it has captured the disgusted attention of significant parts of the world, not just America. Something is wrong with Edinburg High School, not just with the dude who socked the official. It knew full well it had a monstrous person on its teams, and it removed that person from soccer. But not from football. Why the hell not?

Let UD tell you why. Because football is already an incredibly violent sport (soccer’s violence is all about the audience, with fans in some countries routinely staging fascist rallies while the game proceeds), with enormous tolerance — nay, admiration — of violence. You can just hear the coach telling the principal (assuming the principal even bothered expressing hesitation to him about Duron) that the dude is admittedly too hot-headed for soccer, but football suits his temperament fine. You can hear the coach reminding the principal (and is it a factor that he’s a man and she’s a woman?) that he’s the most valuable player on the team, and they’ve got to get to the playoffs. “They’ve played their hearts out all season. He’s learned from the soccer punishment. I’ll take responsibility for his behavior.”

Football culture up and down the line is pretty fucking twisted; but high school kids! Texas! Ain’t my place out here on Coastal Elite Coast to tell football-crazed Texan towns how to live; but I can tell them that we’re all watching, and when their way of life produces Emmanuel Duron we’re judging everyone down there, not just Duron. Durons are enabled by groups of moral idiots who can’t see past the next field goal. If students at Edinburg High want to be angry, they should be angry with their coach, their principal, and their superintendent. Those are the people who make Durons happen.

With the shocked and appalled eyes of the world on their little school, Edinburg needed to acknowledge its twistedness, and needed to make a strong reformist statement. Sorry, kiddies.

LOL

He wanders, pale, sleepless, delusional, into a room, and performs a surrealistic piece that more and more people are calling, simply, “46 minutes.”

Soon the title of Trump’s unprecedented performance last Wednesday will shorten to 46, a nod to its obvious precursor, John Cage’s silent, genre-busting, 4’33. Recall the shock, amusement, anger, discomfort, and fascination when, in a New York concert hall in 1952, a pianist walked onstage with a flourish, sat grandly at a grand piano, and for four minutes and thirty-three seconds proceeded to do absolutely nothing. In a grand room of the White House, Trump’s appearance – vacuous, arrogant, hallucinatory – generated similar emotions.

Yet because of its basically unendurable sickness, the president’s performance was above all ignored by almost every American media outlet. It appeared only on Facebook.

Susan Glasser argues that we avert our eyes at our peril.

… This might have been a holy-shit speech, but it came in the “yeah, whatever” phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency. The courts have thrown out his legal team’s cases. The battleground states have all certified their election results affirming Biden’s win. The Electoral College will meet on December 14th, and the outcome does not appear to be in doubt.

And yet there are nearly fifty days until Biden’s Inauguration. This is far, far beyond the craziness of the past four years. Is this the kind of speech from their leader that Americans should just ignore?

… [Not] a single Republican senator had a word to say about Trump’s insane remarks from the White House on Wednesday …

… [W]hen the President launches a direct attack on the most important traditions of American democracy, I’m not ready to say “Yeah, whatever” just yet.

The presidency of Donald Trump is not mere performance art. In its degenerate stage it looks like Cage; it looks like Jarry. It looks like Mary Tyrone wandering in, pale, sleepless, and delusional at the end of Long Day’s Journey. But it is real. It is actually happening. A fourth Christ of Ypsilanti has entered Milton Rokeach’s hospital, this one with presidential powers.

‘Newt is coming from a very dark place. First, his wife is the “ambassador” to the “Vatican” and is according to unimpeachable sources in bed with (yes literally) an illegitimate pope who has openly questioned Donald Trump’s Christian faith. Behind Gingrich stand the massed powers and riches of the idolatrous Roman Catholic church, which, in league with George Soros, seeks the death of Donald Trump in order to protect their global “brand” from the internationally proliferating MAGA movement. If you break the letters NEWTGINGRICH into their component parts, you get GRINCH TWINGE. Newt Gingrich is The GRINCH who Stole the Election Without a TWINGE of Guilt. His wife’s name – Callista – is the title of an 1855 novel by none other than John Henry Newman, the most famous British Catholic priest ever. Aligned with Newt’s popery and Sorosian World Order is his capture by Bolivarian “Chavismo” and more broadly Hugo Chavez’s “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.” For someone with this portfolio to call me destructive is really something.’

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(UD thanks a reader for correcting her extensive misspellings of Sidney Powell.)

“Deep state” isn’t the right term — its overtone is too clandestine, its undertone too nefarious — but let’s go with it, co-opt it, turn a put-down into a point of honor, the way gay rights activists did with “queer” and anti-Trump feminists did with “nasty woman.”

Let’s define it ourselves, not as a swampy society of self-preserving bureaucrats in Washington but as a steadfast, tradition-minded legion of public officials and civil servants all over the country, in every branch of government.

These officials and servants are distinguished by a professionalism that survives and edges out their partisan bearings, by an understanding that the codes of conduct and rules of engagement become more important, not less, when passions run hot. They’re incorrigible that way. Invaluable, too.

… Anthony Fauci is the steely superhero of my deep state, and he’s flanked and fortified by all the government health officials who also pushed back against the quackery of Scott Atlas, the Trump-flattering pandemic adviser who resigned on Monday.

They belong to a quiet and then not-so-quiet resistance that blunted, thwarted or tried to blunt and thwart Trump’s worst impulses when it came not just to public health but also to foreign policy, immigration, the environment. In The Times late last week, Lisa Friedman described such efforts within the Environmental Protection Agency.

“With two months left of the Trump administration,” she wrote, “career E.P.A. employees find themselves where they began, in a bureaucratic battle with the agency’s political leaders. But now, with the Biden administration on the horizon, they are emboldened to stymie Mr. Trump’s goals and to do so more openly.”

That’s the deep state rearing up. That’s the deep state roaring.

Because Communists help Communists. Because Venezuela has long had a special relationship with North Korea. Because Democrats know that our coastal defenses are weakest in the state of Maine, where the deep state replaced patriot Paul LePage with Democrat and Woman Janet Mills.

I predict a series of more and more paranoid presentations after this one. This is Number One.

I predict that this guttering man will do something psychotic on camera. No one can stop him. Sane people have tried.

Time to read the 25th Amendment with care. We can’t have the most powerful person on earth be isolated and insane. We need the Vice President, the Cabinet, and Congress to work together to remove this unhinged threat to democracy, and to the world.

Hungarian Lawmaker Resigns after Caught Fleeing a ‘Sex Party’ by Climbing Down a Drainpipe

No. Duh.

But it still will, of course.

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And then there’s the federal government:

“McKinsey’s abhorrent conduct also demands that Congress consider broader action. McKinsey earns billions of dollars from contracts with the federal government. No firm that proposes paying kickbacks for overdose deaths should receive a single cent from U.S. taxpayers.”