… that Mount Rushmore was America’s grandest outcropping of kitsch.

No, no, they’d say! I went there in the fourth grade with my family and we all thought it was awesome!

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WE HAVE GOT TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN. If it takes a Go Fund Me page; if it takes bake sales all over this land, my lord, all over this land; if it takes sacrifice sacrifice and more sacrifice, this has got to happen.

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Will it be as great as Carhenge? No. But it will be great.

Yes, yes. But the main thing is:

Look at the second photograph in this article. The picture of Sheldon Adelson and Trump. Doesn’t Adelson’s hair go with Trump’s face, and Trump’s hair go with Adelson’s face?

See how the Devil and the Demon Rum Deceive!

… of her rival Elizabeth Bennet; and this oldish word – brilliancy – came to UD‘s mind as she contemplated her undergraduate professor, Erich Heller. Not prone to thinking about the past (or the future – your blogueuse is somewhat in the buddhist way), UD was borne back into the past (truncated Great Gatsby reference there … hey it was your decision to read a literary blogger), via this memoir, written by Heller’s niece, and very much an evocation of the scholar of Rilke and Kafka who had a great impact on wee UD at Northwestern University in the 1970’s.

Heller’s brilliancy – by which I mean in part charisma – is obvious enough in this portrait of the young man as an impassioned Czech Jewish aesthete.

When I knew him, he looked like this.

Still the fully open, searching, lively eyes. He was always a beautiful polished dresser, which contrasted vividly with the thready hippies to whom he lectured so fiercely about the loss of meaning in the modern world. His own world had flamboyantly fallen apart with the Nazis, from whom he barely managed to escape, while his beloved brother spent years in concentration camps. (He also managed to survive.)

It was utterly, almost comically, clear to UD, as this man lectured, that he saw no way in which he could possibly begin to convey his and the world’s historical, spiritual, and existential wound to these frisky frisbee throwers.

Sixtyish, gay, hyper-snobby, dismissive of all NU students, all Americans (after cosmopolitan Prague, he spent years at Cambridge University, and now found himself prone on the prairie), and certainly all women (does the memoir ever make that one clear), Heller nonetheless hugely, hotly, attracted deine kleine Bloggerin.

How hotly? I had recurrent waking and sleeping fantasies about stumbling upon a solitary suffering Heller on the school’s lakeside beach and comforting him. Just – you know – happening to be the only person in the world who fully intuited his intellectual and emotional grief, his vell-done Weltschmerz (I’m antic about it now, but I assure you it was all passionately earnest then)…

Or imagine this – I was taking his all-Rilke-all-the-time course, and it was I don’t know the fifth Heller course I’d taken (Kafka, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Kleist?) and I was all fired-up as usual to re-enter this man’s hallowed hall … And yet from the first day of that particular course, I would sit, take out my paperback, and, at the opening “semi-operatic” tones of Heller’s voice (the memoir writer calls them this; I’d simply say operatic – he had a fine booming basso), fall completely to sleep. Ach, Doktor Freud, do tell. Vot vos dis Heller shpell?

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I wrote excellent exams and papers, appeared every day in all his courses, sat there at full attention (I figured out how to stay awake in the Rilke course; I cured myself, Doktor!) – eventually the poor man had to notice me a little bit. I didn’t care whether he did, but eventually he did. I remember two post-class chats: In one I must have mentioned Nabokov and was startled by the casual violence of Heller’s dismissal of him (something about his obscenity?). The other is much more vivid to me because it was much more consequential. I told him that I was miserable in the Medill School of Journalism (I’d enrolled there rather than become an English major because I’d convinced myself I’d never get a job with a degree in English), absolutely miserable. And he looked at me with those avid open eyes and just as casually said: “If you are not happy there, vhy don’t you leave?”

And I swear to you, mes petites, minutes after this exchange I marched to the journalism building and began the process of dropping out of Medill.

More on Heller later today. Must weed. As UD likes to say: Weeding is fundamental.

Texas Tech must be seen to be believed. In this earlier post, UD surveyed the school’s long list of sadistic coaches – not to mention its bringing on board and giving all its money to luminaries like Alberto Gonzales and Tommy Tuberville – and concluded that something way kinky was going on there. It’s as if the place seeks after twisted people to hurt its students and its reputation.

Incredibly, this idea – that TTU actually recruits the sadistic as a kind of school policy – seems not so wild. For with all that sadomasochism behind it, TTU went and hired another one … or another two…

Twelve of the 21 women who played for Texas Tech since [Marlene] Stollings took over the program in 2018 have left, [citing player abuse]…. [Also, players accused] former strength and conditioning coach Ralph Petrella of berating and sexually harassing them … [Stollings has now also been fired.]

Luckily, assistant coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins is still there!

[One player reports she was] told by assistant coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins to snap a rubber band on her wrist when she had a negative thought.

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Plus you don’t have to be selected for a varsity team to get the shit beat out of you in Lubbock. Lubbock is one of America’s most violent cities. Just walk outside.

Oh Lord, our President Falwell

Doth really really ball well.

Thou madest his cock

To roll and to rock.

Amen! He hath answered thy Call well.

… would be the revelation that Wayne LaPierre took all those private taxpayer-subsidized jets to Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

But you can’t have everything.

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Broke, rudderless, and mired in costly litigation, the NRA is now facing a real possibility of going out of business—or being forcibly dismantled.

… LaPierre [takes] a $2.1 million salary, enormous for the head of a nonprofit—the NRA is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) social welfare organization …

… neighbors.

Which – I’m having trouble keeping track, but … – which I think is the next thing that’s gonna happen to Alan Dershowitz.

There is a pervasive culture of negligence, petty corruption and blame-shifting endemic to the Lebanese bureaucracy, all overseen by a political class defined by its incompetence and contempt for the public good… Emergency aid will only magnify public humiliation and helplessness. Yesterday’s explosion made clear that Lebanon is no longer a country where decent people can live secure and fulfilling lives.

A very angry opinion piece that wisely keeps its anger under control. But just barely.

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Another opinion piece, Washington Post:

[N]o one in government, no one with any responsibility for the care and well-being of Lebanon and its people, cares. They never have... People in government have brazenly stolen millions. The latest banking collapse had many reasons, but primarily it happened because we had a unified government that decided it was time to empty out the national bank and central reserves. Most parts of Lebanon have been getting no more than two or three hours of electricity a day because certain members of parliament have companies making millions selling and maintaining generators. Because of the lack of maintenance of the sewage system, the Lebanese are swimming in crap, literally...

We had a civil war that ended only when all the sides figured they could steal a lot more money if they cooperated.

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A third.

The Lebanese people have long suffered as a consequence of the actions and behavior of venal, incompetent individuals; of power-hungry politicians, businesspeople, and shadowy figures, and of geopolitical actors who have made the country their plaything at the expense of good governance… It’s not fate causing Lebanon’s tragedy. Perhaps the shared anger over this event can bring the Lebanese together to push back against the incompetent and the greedy, the functionaries, politicians, and outside players, who have hijacked their country and created conditions for the Lebanese people’s never-ending tragedy; admittedly a monumental task.

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We’re detecting a theme.

[E]vil has taken the form and character of a non-sovereign, irresponsible, criminal state that is hostile to its own population and the cultural urban fabric that makes Beirut a unique Mediterranean city.

… The prospect of a new uprising in the immediate aftermath of this incident is far fetched. But we should not delude ourselves into believing that this brutal, criminal state will succeed in making its populace a lifeless corpse.

With everyone talking about Sonny Boy’s cock-on-a-yacht display, it’s time to remind you that the Trump-BFF president of Libertine University has long been a laughable hypocrite. (Only a few at Libertine seem to mind.) He got it from his daddy, whose valedictory Christopher Hitchens memorably provided in this famous clip.

The Kansas Secretary of State, famous for scaring the shit out of the kiddies by mounting a huge gun in the Shawnee Memorial Day Parade, just lost his Senate primary.

On the bright side: He and BFF Donald Trump will both soon be free to go on a camping and fishing trip together at Yo! Semite! National Park.

Lo these many blogyears, UD has covered immense tons of political hoaxes – hoaxes that involve sociopathic ideologues creating/impersonating political victims. If you scan her HOAX category, you’ll discover many varieties of political victim hoax, dating way back, and you’ll probably ask yourself why they happen… i.e., what could possibly be the motive behind such bizarre, incredibly destructive, and self-defeating schemes (as with the latest such hoax, the hoaxers attempt, when the shit hits the fan, to “kill” their creation, but it rarely works).

Long ago, UD wrote an article about the Yasusada hoax, in which a white American dude created a fake atomic bomb-traumatized Japanese poet in order to … bring attention to atomic-bomb trauma? But faking it undermined our ability to trust “testimony.” Seemed an obviously contemptible thing to do, thought ol’ UD; yet she encountered plenty of people who said it doesn’t matter if there are all these liars out there making us think people like Yasusada exist and making their words (their creators’ words) move us to tears … cuz u know the end justifies the means, silly, so what if the speaker is not an actual person who suffered but a non-suffering amoral cynical manipulative POS hoaxer.

We can certainly anticipate similar defenses of the, er, troubled BethAnn McLaughlin, who created a persona packed with political victimization (recall UD‘s Rule of Hoax Revelation: Hoaxers typically cannot control themselves, and way over-endow their creations with political victim traits (or, if you’re trying to destroy someone, as in these two hoaxes (scroll down), with political victimizer traits), and nice trusting people rushed to adore her (the hoaxer’s creation, that is).

At some point, who knows why, things began to get out of hand for McLaughlin and her suffering hand puppet, so she gave her Covid, which you might say was a stroke of genius, but babe when you’re trying to prop up a vacancy the vacancy is likely to be even more troublesome ‘dead.’ Remember Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George and Martha had a perfectly serviceable relationship with their hoax son until George tried to kill him.

But that was pathos and need, and we are – just like Nick – appalled and pitying at the thought of the emotional desperation that generated that boy. No one, OTOH, really wants to enter the vile psyche of a person capable of exploiting the kindness, trust, indignation, and idealism of large numbers of people by turning what is most serious and true and needed in them into a sick personal joke. “Ms. McLaughlin has prompted particular frustration and disgust by posing as a Hopi woman, right as the coronavirus has caused disproportionate harm to Indigenous communities in the United States.”

Bottom line, stated by a Native American journalist: “[I]t does change our ability to advocate for ourselves when we are constantly being replaced by frauds…”

Certainly your blogueuse fears to venture too far into these farts of darkness. Let us simply say that they are satisfying a profound need for attention coupled with an equally profound hatred of the world (imagine how pleasurable it has been for McLaughlin to contemplate what she’s putting over on everyone).

… up and running.

America’s hard-working medical professionals.

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Looks as though they’re selling the house. Quite a spread. Crime pays, can’t be denied.

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Plus you gotta admire the guy’s balls.

LIGOTTI and [his business] Whole Health filed a civil suit in 2016 alleging that [United Health Care] withheld payments [to him] in violation of ERISA.

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And while we’re at it we need to ultrasound your uterus.

[One patient told government investigators she reluctantly agreed to a gynecological ultrasound] “just to get [Ligotti’s staff] to shut up [about it].“

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Ligotti was “adamant that every patient submit urine during every visit. … LIGOTTI would get angry with employees who forgot to collect urine and yelled at them to fill cups with toilet water if they had to.”

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UD has a sneaking admiration for deep, committed, relentless, crooks. Ligotti and his wife know they have been under investigation for years, and have responded with an absurd time-consuming lawsuit, letters expressing faux outrage that someone seems to be abusing Ligotti’s medical privileges, an attempt to file for bankruptcy because their three properties worth millions are, you know, worth zero, and a successful attempt to get a PPP loan.