… self-indulgent, and enraged.’

“He’s in his Fat Elvis phase now.”

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

The X Spaces interview delivered Donald Trump without makeup or dress-up, talking unselfconsciously: manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy—and ultimately, formless and endless. 

The lists of adjectives keep coming.

… is the grand title the endless two-lane road to Cherry Springs State Park gives itself. Along the silent black willow and black cherry-lined highway, faintly legible signs urge a dark night at Frosty Hollow, Rough Cut, or Kettle Creek Lodge. You’re startled, as you adjust your brights, by every headlight. After all, it’s midnight, and almost no one lives in the state forest. But every car contains the same red light head torch yours does – everyone’s going to or coming from the starfield.

The night’s partly cloudy but the clouds are thin and there’s more clear black sky than cloud. As your eyes adjust to the dark it’s clear that it’s clear – it’s clear that the constellations and the satellites and the meteors will be attending this evening’s event, and that the meteors will even have their tails on. The cloudiness you still see is the Milky Way.

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

Now you creep, with only your little red headlight, among settlements of blankets and cameras. You’re guided more by human voices than by light.

I love the murmur on this mountaintop, the gentle talk, on the long field, of sunspots and space capsules.

Sotto voce, sublunary, subculture.

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

We’re all scoping the Silver-Tailed Meteor tonight, and, this being prime hunting season, we’re seeing one every few minutes. And while of course we’re here for the every-day inconceivability of the galactic show, we embrace in a special way the small darting foreground of the meteors. These we understand; these draw near and show the heavens more earthly.

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

Mid-August and I’m trembling. One shivers slightly, looking up there. / The hardness and the brightness… Each meteor is a long cool drink of water, a fluency against the hardness.

We deepen the murmur with our own go-nowhere talk of physics and metaphysics; and eventually, knowing nothing, we strap back on the red light head torches, fold up our beach chairs, and drive home. Halfway there, we see the backside of a bear as it lumbers into the woods.

… to see the height of the perseids. Will blog from there.

… ye.

Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Weird. You know it’s interesting nobody really knows his last name. If you ask people, do you know what his last name is, nobody has any idea what it is. Drumpf. It’s like Drumpf. I don’t know, how the hell did this happen?

… alike.

Trump’s opening statement at his recent news conference announced the likely imminence of a 1920’s style depression and also World War III. This was his howdeedo, his little world review before he took questions. From his earlier speeches and tweets we can add mass slaughter on our city streets. Mass slaughter from the border. Your child’s forced transgendering. Babies killed moments after birth. Sick filthy books lining the walls of the local library. Subsidized tampons.

UD likes the phrase dystopian hype very much (see this post’s title). Boiled down, you could just say that authoritarian strongmen always try to scare us into voting for them — Only I can fix it, but first my campaign must convince Americans that existence as such is desperately, terrifyingly, in need of fixing. Trumpian authoritarians like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and JD Vance feature, in their books and rhetoric, a religiously inflected dystopian hype, in which the always-fallen world has REALLY let itself go lately, with America an unbearable hellscape of suicide, loneliness, alienation, and late-night snacking. Only Jesus – as interpreted by Pater Edmund Waldstein – can fix it.

Into this thorny tangle of statecraft and soulcraft now bursts Tim Walz, skipping through Rappaccini’s Garden, hanging a left by the House of Usher, and finally pausing to pick a lovely bouquet of Queen of the Night tulips. It’s Cold Comfort Farm with Trump as Ada Doom and Walz as Flora Poste and it’s pretty fucking funny.

Vance … has seen his approval rating drop since Trump announced him as his running mate on July 15.

The Republican’s net favorability was -6 in a YouGov survey conducted between July 15 and July 19. It dropped to -9 in another survey conducted between July 22 and July 25.

A poll conducted by Marist Poll for NPR and PBS between August 1 and August 4 also had Vance’s net favorability at -9 (34 percent favorable, 43 percent unfavorable). This was 5 points lower than in the same poll in July.

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

There are three reasons for these results, UD would argue, and we will now list them, from superficial all the way to profound.

1.) Nixon Phiz. Walz is clean-shaven, with an open, genial, sociable, curious about the world, sort of expression. Further, his features are utterly anonymous. He looks like everyone. When Steve Martin turned down SNL’s invitation to portray him, one instantly thought of tons of other people for the job, starting with your Uncle Ned. Vance has the odd dark hirsute haunted vaguely paranoid look that did in Nixon in that televised debate with relaxed handsome clean-shaven JFK. Vance skews retro-Euro, like Valentino.

With both Nixon and Vance you kind of have to search out their deep-set eyes in all their hooded tortured black-rimmed complexity to begin to get any sort of read on them as personalities. Coupled with Trump’s Gustav van Aschenbach vibe (orange makeup, baldness with baroque combover, formal expensive suits), this makes for a less than breezy all-American look.

2.) Midnight! All alone with the cat ladies! Vance’s echt-being is smart-ass Yalie, which means he totally lacks the sweet self-deprecation that would have easily carried him aloft past the cat lady thing and past a lot of other unwary trash talk. Too vain and fragile an ego to make an I fucked up blame it on my youth sort of move, he maroons himself in unlikeability territory. It’s a variant of Trump doubling down on the bogus helicopter story. Totally lacks the ability to say I guess I got it wrong and move on. Trump is threatening to sue the NYT for doubting a story no one corroborates and for which he provides no documentation. Anything other than show humility.

3.) Kah-RAZY Kah-THOLICISM. For those who look deeper than trash talk and weird faces, there’s Vance’s super-reactionary Catholicism, unrecognizable to Catholics up to and including the Pope — a person who adherents like Vance seem to regard as the anti-Pope. Pantingly eager to see America convert to something that looks a lot like a theocracy, Vance is bound to alienate any non-insane religious person.

In an ‘angry’ phone call to The New York Times, Trump is said to have lashed the paper for claims he’d lied about a near-miss during a helicopter ride with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

NYT journalist Maggie Haberman – the paper’s star political reporter, who is said to have Trump’s ear –  said Trump angrily insisted he could provide proof of the near-death experience.

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

The only NDE Trump can honestly point to is his current presidential campaign.

Mr. Miller stopped paying some of the family’s bills, including, according to a lawsuit, the maintenance and docking fees for their Van Dutch speedboat — a frequent backdrop for late-night parties shared on Instagram. Such models generally sell for more than $1 million…

… Emergency medical workers found Mr. Miller unconscious in a white Porsche Carrera that he had rigged to poison himself …

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

UD never knows quite what to do with the NYT’s luridly fascinating chronicles of the downfall of high-flying, risk-taking idjits. She enjoys the F. Scott Fitzgerald fizz of these accounts, the lascivious tell of the departed’s lethally high-end products and adventures, his sudden weeping in corporate meeting rooms as the walls close in …

Since the fool in this case saw fit to borrow tens of millions of dollars he couldn’t pay back, and then to saddle his wife and small children with his debt (he left a big life insurance policy, but will it pay out?), one feels okay not feeling much. I mean, pity. I guess. But since the facts of the case are so stereotypically cautionary, so much the oldest allegory in the world, the specific person to whom it happened gets lost, and one not too guiltily feels comfortable reading the account the way most people are reading it – as a final twisted chapter of clueless conspicuous consumption, the short sad bio of an Instagram braggart who meets his apotheosis in a cloud of high-performance, super-exclusive, carbon monoxide.

… “quickly falls apart,” leaving the Trump campaign in …

… toxic shock.

… she looks great in jeans.

Owen Ziliak/The Republic

Interesting contrast.