This is must-see tv. When you watch Georgia’s Gabriel Sterling, you’re watching the village finally getting back at the village bully. Finally. Not that much of the village; it’s still only a few brave souls. But it’s really happening.

The twisted bully who commands crowds to shriek LOCK HER UP is finally getting what he has so richly deserved. His twisted, violent associates – most recently, bloodthirsty Joe diGenova – are also being called out.

To be sure, millions of people love violence – taking part in it, or watching it – and the last full measure of madmen and madwomen still standing around Trump at the very end will continue to give those millions what they want. But the overwhelming majority of Americans detests viciousness, cruelty, bullying, tormenting, and, like Gabriel Sterling, they are finding their voice.

Today, even William Barr is willing to say no fraud. He will probably welcome the vile attack Trump will level against him; he will probably be grateful to be fired. Maybe he can fashion some sort of respectable future for himself…

Meanwhile, watch out for more Gabriel Sterlings, people willing to call perversion perversion, people willing to be openly decent in an indecent time. Bravo.

It’s not – as Samuel Johnson claimed – patriotism. Months ago we got past whatever muck-sweat heavery the president thought might convey love of country to his rallies. We’re now into the final scenes (which, faithful UD readers know, I believe have a small but real chance of featuring executive self-slaughter), and these begin with institutional nihilism: All of our elections are rigged, including the one I won last time. Every operating part of America is bullshit: The law, the constitution, the FBI, the CIA: It’s all NOTHING. NOTHING! Nothing but global communist interstellar Soros machinations against me and you and there’s NOTHING we can do. None of it means anything. It’s pure murderous malignancy.

Here, Arkansas is the cutting edge. Got there a long time before everyone else.

So now the Republican party is worried that Republican voters will sit out the Georgia run-offs because why not? Why the hell not? Nothing matters. Nothing means anything. It’s all rigged. I don’t want to be a sucker.

Listen to Mitch McConnell lead his fellow Republican senators in singing the national anthem here.

So that’s the institutional final scene. We’re gonna get Trump’s personal nihilistic endgame pretty soon. Hold onto your hat.

One of the president’s lawyers issues the following statement about a fired Trump official who said that the election was clean:

He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.

Now that he’s exposed millions of Americans to a fatal pathogen, embarrassed his home institution (Stanford), and called on the people of Michigan to rise up against their governor because she’s trying to arrest the spread of covid, Scott Atlas’s work for Mr Trump is done. He has resigned, trailing clouds of gory.

“GEORGIA GOVERNOR, DEFYING TRUMP, SAYS HE’LL ‘FOLLOW THE LAW'”

Complainancies of the loseur, and late

Burgers and Diet Coke in a baby chair,

And a gold eagle with its wings outspread

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The violent rush of avenging hatred.

He dreams a little, and he feels the dark

Encroachment of this new catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.

His rooms of opulence and fine bright blings

Seem things in some procession of the dead
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of his dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Bedminster,
Dominion of the trap and fairway bunker.

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

Why should he give his country to the Dems?
What is autocracy if it can fail
After they hold free and fair elections?
Shall he not find in motions of the court,
In pungent tweets and chicken wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of winning?
Malignity must live within himself:
Passions of rage, or moods in falling polls;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Vexations when the Bidens come; nasty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
No pleasures and all pains, remembering
The past of glory and the present doom.
These are the measures destined for his soul.

Massively fatal drug distribution, to alter the quotation slightly, been berry, berry good to John Hammergren, whose rancid immorality has been cleaned up nice and good by outfits like CSIS, which allowed him to buy his way onto its board of trustees.

Every now and then an article appears that brings back the beautiful Hammergren way of life, in which you direct floods of killing substances into clueless hollers in West Virginia and suck up hundreds of millions of dollars for yourself while everyone dies and entire municipalities wither.

Yesterday’s New York Times told of a recommendation by the consultancy McKinsey that Purdue (Hammergren’s now-notorious supplier) keep the drugs flowing like crazy, and its distributors happy, by handing them cash whenever someone in their distribution territory overdosed. Overdoses after all are so… awkward. So unpleasant. So… actionable? I mean, a lot of these people die. Some of them have very compellingly grieving mothers who talk to newspapers and attorneys and all.

It’s the old drug dealer problem: You want addicts of course, cuz that’s where your big reliable bucks come from; but you don’t want dead or spasming or frothing at the mouth or almost dead addicts. You want nice functional non-deadbeat addicts. McKinsey’s solution to growing numbers of dead and dying addicts that might make the distributors… uncomfortable… is to compensate them for each and every OD. A good faith gesture:

If you’re a pharmaceutical-company CEO who is making an opioid that is killing people, you already know it’s a problem, and you already have a pretty good idea of how you have to handle it. You hire a firm like McKinsey, in this hypothetical scenario, to make it look as if you’re not the one coming up with the unsavory options. It gives you some numbers and some options on paper (actually, at least traditionally, a hardbound blue book). It also gives you plausible deniability. “I didn’t come up with this idea, Your Honor. It was the consultants!”

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

“How do the C.E.O.s of these companies sleep at night?” Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, said at a recent news conference.

Sleep at night? John Hammergren, from his CSIS perch, is currently handing out how-to-stay-healthy tips to the American public. Take long walks, try the Mediterranean diet, and cram twenty oxys a day down your gullet.

That’s what you get when you elect a businessman-president!

… and our American democracy!

“The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud,” [complained one of Trump’s lawyers].

But the 3rd Circuit judges who rejected the appeal were all appointed by Republicans: Bibas, who was nominated by Trump in 2017, Chief Justice Brooks Smith, who was nominated in 2001 by President Bush; and Judge Michael Chagares, who was nominated by Bush in 2006.

“You’re just a lightweight,” Mr. Trump snapped, raising his voice and pointing a finger [at a journalist] in anger. “Don’t talk to me that — don’t talk — I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”

Ubus always think that they can talk like gutter trash, but everyone must address them as if they’re the highest of the high. It don’t work that way, babe.

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

Staging by Alfred Jarry.

Malva works at the pharmacy at the Harris Teeter in North Bethesda, Maryland. A couple of days ago an older man walked unsteadily into the store, blood streaming from his forehead, hands cut and dirty from cushioning a fall. “Could you direct me to the men’s room?” he asked her. “I need to clean up.”

Malva took one look, got a chair, sat the man on it, and said, “I’m calling an ambulance.” She made the call, then left for a moment to gather material to start cleaning his wound.

Other employees approached, asking the man questions designed to disclose whether he’d suffered brain damage. “They asked me what year it is,” he told UD later, “and I totally aced it.” (This was an odd moment because, imagining herself asked the same question, UD suddenly realized that she might have said 2021. A measure of her eagerness to see the back of a certain president.)

Malva asked the man for the phone number of a relative. She made the call, but this particular relative was recharging her phone in their bedroom while sitting in front of their house reveling in the remarkably strong sunlight in late afternoon in November in Garrett Park. With her dog quietly sitting next to her, her daughter working remotely in the house (visiting for the holiday), and her husband talking a walk, she breathed deeply, felt the sun on her face, and thanked whatever gods there be for a good life.

But now her daughter appeared next to her in the front garden, scowling into her phone. “Is he okay? What happened?” Malva told her her father had had a bad fall near the store, and that an ambulance had just arrived to take him to Suburban Hospital. She stayed on the phone as long as it took to calm UD‘s daughter down and give her complete information about Mr UD‘s condition, and as La Kid and UD prepared an overnight bag for him (two volumes on Kant from A History of Philosophy, pajamas, cookies), she called again to make sure the two of them were okay. She took a picture of Mr UD‘s wound and sent it to UD‘s daughter, so they could see exactly what they were dealing with.

The next morning, Mr UD in his bed recovering (the scan revealed a brain robustly able to assimilate Frederick Charles Copleston CBE SJ on Immanuel Kant), and UD preparing a special breakfast for him, Malva again called La Kid, wanting to know how Mr UD was doing. La Kid told her about his twenty stitches, and about how despite the nasty laceration he was able to keep his record intact: In seventy years of life, he has never spent a night in a hospital. (“The only possible exception,” Mr UD once said, “was my birth. I don’t know whether my mother stayed in the hospital overnight.”)

So today Mr UD, with his big white head bandage, looks like a mashup of Marat and Apollinaire. He feels fine.

And today – Thanksgiving – UD thanks Malva, who took one look at a hurting human being and was instantly in it for the long haul.

It’s about time. My beloved country will get over Trump’s threat to our democracy.

I have such confidence in the soundness of our democratic foundations that I never lamented; but I certainly felt anger and anxiety along the way.

A sense of surreality and a sense of humor helped a lot; you don’t spend decades teaching modernist literature without knowing that the world can turn kafkaesque, and that the absurd is as comic as it is tragic. But you’re never entirely prepared for a truly wild turn of events.

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

And what is left to say about The Genius of the Carpathians, America’s Père Ubu? Only that I hope his behavior over the last two weeks has begun to unsettle some of the people who follow him out of a desire for an authoritarian government. I hope they come to realize how grotesque that desire is; I hope they begin to perceive how grotesque he – like all authoritarians – is. Especially grotesque on American soil.

I understand how America made the conman; I’ll admit to having a hell of a time understanding how America made the conman president. Biden’s strong showing vindicates the belief I’ve held throughout these last months: America has always been under there — under the cruelty, ignorance, and arrogance. Virtually all Americans recognize that when a White House is represented by Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell there is absolutely nothing to recognize; we are fundamentally a sane rational earnest practical people, and when our government degenerates into curdled cynicism and idiot fanaticism, we know, most of us, that we have entirely lost our way.

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

And now Mary’s uncle settles into a new persona: Sideshow Bob, eternally popping up to try to vanquish Joe Biden.

University Diaries understands that Trump’s legal dream team will be announcing the addition of Professor James Tracy, of Newtown massacre conspiracy fame, to their election-overturning effort. While not an attorney, Tracy is a noted communications expert, and will, a source tells UD, be the president’s chief spokesperson on the national vote, clarifying to the public the complex means by which it was stolen.

A veteran of dozens of conspiracy theories – not only the Sandy Hook mass murders, but “the mass shooting in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in 2012; the Washington Navy Yard shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; and the massacre at a holiday meeting in December in San Bernardino, Calif.,” were all staged by anti-gun zealots in the Obama government – Tracy has the guts to go after the truth wherever it lies:

Lenny and Veronique Pozner, the parents of Noah Pozner, who was 6 when he was killed at Newtown, wrote [in] an opinion piece … that Mr. Tracy had demanded that they prove that Noah ever existed, that they were his parents and that they owned the rights to photographs of him. The professor, they said, “personally sought to cause our family pain and anguish.”

There is a Trump lawyer named Powell

Whose ideas come direct from her bowel

The woman’s so fruity

That even Mad Rudy

Has needed to throw in the towel