I have for years subscribed to “Tom Tomorrow’s” (i.e., Dan Perkins’s) comic strip called This Modern World, and — for decades before subscribing — fanboyed over its appearances in a variety of independent newspapers (including Funny Times). Above is his most recent weekly entry.

For context: Sparky (a well-spoken lefty penguin with a wry sense of humor) is a recurring character in the strip. Perkins’s newsletter is in fact called “Sparky’s List,” so I guess you can think of the penguin as his main character — often a standin for Perkins himself. Here’s what the cartoonist says at the start of this week’s newsletter:

I have been wanting to do a cartoon for awhile about what comes after. To be clear, I’m not enough of an optimist to believe that half of Sparky’s campaign promises here will ever be embraced by the Democratic party, but except for sending Musk to Mars and the Trump pissoir, I’m entirely serious about everything he says. And I’d be highly supportive of those proposals as well! Though the pissoir bit doesn’t *really* make sense — why would President Sparky be designing Trump’s mausoleum? To which I reply, don’t overthink it. But putting aside the likelihood of any of it, the rest of his proposals are just the bare minimum necessary for this country to eventually recover from the cancer of Trumpism. (Along with a lot of other things, but I’ve only got six panels here.)

(Later in this week’s newsletter, he explains that the last panel alludes to a line from the film Air Bud: “Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball!” You come to expect this sort of mixed-media cross-cultural in-joke from time to time… Perkins is also a huge fan, for instance, of Star Trek and sundry other pop-culture phenomena, and salts many of his strips with knowing references to them. But this is never at such an insider level that you must yourself be an insider to get it!)

I’ve got nothing to add, really, except to recommend that you subscribe (if you don’t already) to Sparky’s List yourself. NOTE: It’s not free1… but I’d be surprised and disappointed if you ever thought you’d wasted your money!

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When did it the pain start? I’ve been trying to remember…

Oh, I know when I first decided to deal with it: this past September, at my annual medical checkup. I told the doc that I had this pain which was driving me crazy — it was way the heck up almost in the groin, at the top inside of my thigh. It didn’t feel like a muscle pain, like I’d pulled or strained something. It was sharp — pointed — almost like I was being stabbed there every time I moved a certain way. Tying my right shoe had become very difficult; cutting the toenails on my right foot, all but impossible: it just hurt too much to fold my right ankle over my left thigh.

He started to ask, “Is the pain in the scro—” but I interrupted him.

“No,” I said it’s not [pregnant pause] there.”

(Believe me: that prospect had worried me, too, and probably a lot worse than it worried the doctor — going back at least a few months before this appointment. I read everything I could find on the sources of sharp pains there. But this pain was weird because it wasn’t obviously in an area where there were any, y’know, organs of any kind. It felt like it was at the top inside of my leg, not my torso.)

So he ordered up a couple of X-ray views of the area, and he didn’t even hesitate when he saw them. His terse summary: “Right hip osteoarthritis.”

I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I welcomed the diagnosis (shortly confirmed by others, like an orthopedic specialist) — I knew what it would mean: hip-replacement surgery.

But that was just the point: my hip? For my entire life, whenever someone referred to their or someone else’s hip — when I referred to mine — they weren’t (er, were they?) referring to the inside of a thigh. They meant the outside of a thigh, on up onto the… well, up onto the butt itself. When you described someone as “wide-hipped,” you were talking about an outer diameter, not an inner. Asked to measure your hips, you’d imagine, say, a pair of outside calipers to span the designated area, not inside ones:

So the osteoarthritis, yeah, okay, I could grudgingly accept that part; I’ll be 75 in a few months, and such problems go with the territory, right? Right up there with cataracts, dental adversity, downsized homes, and fixed incomes.

But… my hip???

Anyway, yes: it’s my hip. That mystery location, at the top inside of my thigh? It’s exactly where most patients with hip osteoarthritis feel pain.

Duh.

And so my calendar assures me: I’ll have the hip replaced — barring any surprises — on Friday, March 6. To prepare for it, I’ve met with an orthopedist, two physical therapists, several incredibly competent nursing specialists, and (twice) the surgeon who will actually do the deed. I have (or soon will) a complete array of gear to help during the post-op period: walker, long “grabber”-type things to minimize the need to bend over, a weird sock-putter-onner gizmo which resembles an athletic shin guard with cords attached to the sides, and so on. I’ve got shoes that don’t need tying, and I’ve got moccasins I can just step into, barefoot, when I get out of bed. I’ve got extra-loose yoga pants, and a complete program of physical-therapy routines to be performed every day, without fail…

I am, in short, facing the surgery with an embarrassing amount of privilege.

I’m facing it, too, with an embarrassing level of, well, trepidation born of medical innocence:

I’ve never had a broken bone. I’ve never had surgery. I’ve never had COVID, or rabies or tetanus, or an STD. Childhood stuff: measles, yes; mumps, yes; chicken pox, sure. And yes — in my mid-70s, right? — I’ve had colonoscopies. I once had a cyst removed from my lower back. I’ve had teeth pulled, and I’ve had root canals. Over the course of several years in my 20s and 30s, I had a series of kidney stones (which passed, after much agony but with no surgery, and then never recurred). And yes, I have an array of prescribed medications I take every day (to boost my thyroid readings, lower my cholesterol, etc.)

But in general, considering how little attention I pay to my health, I’ve had a weird shortage of medical adventures. Facing a sort of partial amputation-and-repair, in such circumstances, feels… it feels momentous. To admit that embarrasses the bejeezus out of me, given the health issues other people (especially those in my age group) have had to face in their lives. I don’t feel guilty, exactly. But it does shame me — given what all those other folks have faced — to be even a little freaked out about the upcoming surgery…

And then, like I said way back at the beginning: I’ve recently been wondering when this “thing” first made itself known to me…

It went back to before the X-ray which enabled the diagnosis. It went back a few more months, to when I first started to fear — and then researched to calm myself — that the pain might be in one of those organs in my lower torso. It went back to about a year before that, the spring of 2024, when I first saw a physical therapist about my frustration with various aches and pains which had made me suddenly feel old…

…and then I remembered the furnished house we rented for about six months in a nearby town before moving here, more or less for good:

I remembered, specifically, that I’d started lying down in the bed in an odd way. My usual approach to getting into bed, and getting under the covers, was always to flip back the covers and kneel on the bed first, then prop myself up with an arm up by the pillow, and lower myself onto my side. But what I started doing in that temporary house was sitting on the edge of the bed, and then falling down towards the pillow. Why? Because there was this strange pain which suddenly revealed itself every time I raised my right knee… a pain at the top inside of my right thigh…

Looking back on it now, all I can think is, like, Holy cow: I lived in pain for three years before looking into it??? (No wonder I feel old.)

There’s a classic college-dorm-bull-session question: when you say you see something red, say, are you seeing what I call “red”? I’m pretty sure (a) there’s no real way of knowing, and (b) it doesn’t make any difference.

I bring this up now because I wonder about feeling pain. Would someone else, feeling my level of pain, have acted to deal with it sooner? Or would they regard this level of pain as no big deal? The answer’s probably the same: no way to know, and it doesn’t matter anyhow. Neither wimp nor hero; just me.

And so now I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be. Cut, hammer, saw away, and sew me back up, Doc! (Just do it under anesthesia.)

Aside, for those following my fiction…

…especially 23kpc:

It’s now looking like sometime in mid- to late spring before I’ll have the ebook to share with paying subscribers. The psychological distraction of the upcoming surgery and recovery is just too, well, distracting: I’ll need to give the project focused attention for a few weeks, which simply ain’t happening sooner.

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I am not — news flash! — a political strategist. But that doesn’t stop me from having opinions about Things Which Can/Should Be Done, especially by (say) the left, or the mainstream media, or anybody else. Here’s one of those opinions:

We need to take Trump out of the crosshairs — especially for the midterm elections.

By that I don’t mean ignore him. With his appetite for attention, to do so is to court even greater disasters.

But I’ll say this: it seems obvious that his handlers have removed the (public) leash. He’s failing physically, mentally, socially1… and nobody’s taken his phone away, nobody’s removed the signing pen from his hand, nobody’s gently nudging him out of his determined trajectory in the direction of outright lunacy.

So what’s going on? I think they still need him to occupy the foreground — and they’re confident it won’t be for long. His general incompetence as a functioning human being, let alone President, may lead him to overstep some critical barrier.2 In that case, well, there’s the 25th Amendment, say — that’s one possible outcome. Or of course he simply may not live much longer.

But anyhow, he seems to no longer serve a useful purpose for them except as a focus of attention. That, or he’s even on the brink of becoming a liability to them…

Which is why — especially for the sake of the midterms — we need to adjust the focus a bit.

A midterm scenario:

Let’s say we keep protesting Trump himself: mocking him, swearing at him, whatever. Hold No Kings rallies every week, filing lawsuits, making speeches, on the floor of the House and Senate, decrying all his many depredations…

If he lasts until Election Day 2026, yeah: by then, at the rate he’s going, the only people who’d vote for GOP candidates are the ones (that weirdly immovable 30% of the GOP or whatever it is) who make up his base. So we’d have succeeded — yay, us!

Now suppose he doesn’t last until Election Day:

We no longer have THE convenient target of everyone’s enmity to direct everyone’s attention to. And all those disaffected GOPers who’ve finally realized that he’s a complete idiot can wipe their foreheads in relief: Thank GOD he’s gone! It’s okay to vote Republican after all — I never wanted to leave!

This is a…

…nightmare.

But wait! There’s more!

So with him gone, however it happens, Vance is in the Oval Office. Yeah, I can easily see him dumping Miller, Rubio, Noem, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, etc. Vought would probably stay put. Maybe Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Bondi, that grinning dope Kevin Hassell (just for his usefulness as a blank wall in interviews). I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter Thiel got an office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…

But now suppose: Roberts, Alito, and Thomas all retire. Instant nominations of young or early-middle-aged replacements! (I really doubt the Federalist Society doesn’t already have a list handy.) Instant confirmations! (…thanks to the recently solidified GOP Congressional majorities.)

So then there we are — stuck for the next gods-only-know-how-many decades. But at least it wouldn’t be with Trump in office! We’re so lucky, huh?!?

[Turning off the sarcasm generator now.]

What can — what should — artists1 do now? (I mean, primarily, artists in the US, but also elsewhere… because I fear all the sh!t going on here is spilling over the rim to affect the rest of the world with its poison.)

All the traditional questions about the value of one’s art remain, only now they’re amplified by anxiety and outright panic, jacked up into frequency ranges audible only to other artists and, I guess, dogs.

• Am I good enough? (Reply: Good enough for WHAT? You mean, like, are you making the world BETTER? Bwaa-ha-ha!)

• Does it help anyone besides me to get this thing — this story, this painting, this joke, this surprising fifteen-second riff that no one’s ever played before — to get this thing out of my own head, for public consumption? (Reply: Okay, let’s grant that it probably gladdens the heart of people who know you to know that you can distract yourself. But it does nothing for people who don’t know you at all — especially for the people who maybe most need and want distraction, who most desperately need and want to experience something to nudge them out of the horror of their daily lives.)

• I just spent my first four waking hours “perfecting” this thing which I can barely describe in human language. Shouldn’t I have spent that time protesting/contacting my representatives/working in a soup kitchen/storming the barricades/erecting the barricades or, if nothing else, “perfecting” something which will inspire others to do that stuff? (Response: Of course you should have! What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you even human?)…

Over 40 years ago, “American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic” Neil Postman published his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. I cannot honestly report that I read it.2 But that book’s title — along with the old expression, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” — gets at the same point I’m getting at here:

When the whole of a civilization is juddering to a collapse, is it right for any of its people to create what are essentially irrelevancies? For that matter, is it right even to appreciate the creative works of others — works which don’t even remotely touch on the multiple concurrent calamities in progress — just because they’re “creative”?

I’m not expecting any definitive answers. (I don’t know if there can be any such things.) I’m just getting this off my chest; I think of it every morning when I sit down to write, and it often chases me away from my desk a short while later.

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[Video: Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young: “Ohio.” Lyrics here.]

First: the non-functional President

It’s been obvious for months that DT is no longer, umm, With It. That’s why it still makes me more than a little crazy to hear people say he wants this or that, or to hear that he’s done this or that. He’s not doing anything except making incoherent public statements.

Second: the dysfunctional powers that actually be

So, if not the Naked Emperor, somebody must be doing all the crazy sh!t we see and hear about every day, right?

Sure. And a lot of those somebodies are becoming more and more visible: Miller; Vought; Bondi; Patel; RFK, Jr.; Dr. Oz; Hegseth; fill in the blank. They’ve apparently been issued blank checks to speak and act on behalf of the nominal Chief Executive. None of them are becoming more visibly competent, mind you; they’re just becoming more visibly noisy, brash, and less interested in, like, governing.

Third: Epstein

Oh yeah. That train’s headed this way.

Fourth: Vance

The blankest of blank slates. As far as I can tell, no one likes him, no one respects him, and he pretty much just emerges to wave words around when he or his advisors think he’s been invisible for too long.

Fifth: ICE and the National Guard

It surpasses imagination that this will turn out even close to “well.” Some trigger-happy or merely sloppy doofus will pull a literal trigger and one or more unarmed citizens will die.

Sixth: the House of Representatives

Back in session in a week! Among the agenda items: finally swearing in Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva — coincidentally a Democrat, elected two weeks ago, and coincidentally committed to affix the final signature to the bipartisan petition to release the Epstein records.

Seventh: the Supreme Court

It’s been depressing to watch, hasn’t it? That’s because they haven’t actually been in session for so long — which is why their “decisions” have all been temporary. But that clock is running out: the Court’s new session starts this month. And possibly a hint of what’s coming: their recent open skepticism about banning therapy for gay/trans teens. (Wonder how that’ll go down with the fundamentalists, if it happens?)

Eighth: …and so… what do I think?

What the people behind DT really want is to get stuff up and running in de facto mode: on autopilot, the theory being that DT himself then becomes utterly dispensable.

And believe it: when the Epstein connections become public, whether released or leaked, those people will drop DT like the morbidly obese leech he is.

The kicker: there’s nobody they can replace him with. Vance? Come on. Yes, he’ll become President. But how many people who still argue ferociously for Trump will do so for Vance as well?

So I predict at this point, then, that is when the absurdly performative kowtowing to DT’s putative agenda — Project 2025’s actual agenda — that’s when it will end. That’s when Congress and the Supreme Court will suddenly brush the scales from their eyes, and apply the goddam brakes.

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That, I believe, is the real purpose of the “flood the zone” strategy of what used to be the GOP. Ostensibly, yes, they’re targeting the inattentive and/or thoughtless in the mass audience, blurring or completely erasing the differences between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong…

But really, the end is to make the thoughtful simply too tired of looking at the unending deluge of sludge — to get us to turn away… to stop even noticing, let alone paying attention to it all.

The way to deal with this as individuals is to recognize that ultimately, we need to turn away from time to time — not entirely to go off-grid, but to just, well, chill for a bit. No one can remain strong indefinitely — can simply survive — by remaining on constant high alert all the time. Heck, even the least qualified physical therapist in the world probably agrees with the most qualified: to become or stay strong, you’ve got to alternate sets with no-activity pauses.

Anyhow, without planning to do so, over the weekend I found a couple examples of exactly what I needed for a 24-hour media break: one old(ish), one brand-new. Here, I thought I’d share them with you. My favorite thing about both of them, now, is that yes, they’re escapist fare… but both “fit” our time.

A stoner action-comedy from 1998… for 2025

[Video: the “Gutterballs” dream sequence from The Big Lebowski… And OF COURSE it makes no real sense; that’s kinda the point of it — of the video and the whole film. Remind you of anything else?]

“I got up so tight I couldn’t unwind.” Yeah. That.

Not everybody loves the film. Heck, some people hate it. But jeez, Louise, did I need to see it this weekend: a completely non-serious look at reasonable (if not always, uh, rational) people confronting people who are OUT OF THEIR MINDS. Nihilists! Capitalists! Some of them even have pet marmots, and are not afraid to use them!

The Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” is a genial, shambling comedy about a human train wreck, and should come with a warning like the one Mark Twain attached to Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot”…

Everybody knows somebody like [Jeff Lebowski, AKA] the Dude — and so, rumor has it, do the Coen brothers. They based the character on a movie producer and distributor named Jeff Dowd, a familiar figure at film festivals, who is tall, large, shaggy and aboil with enthusiasm. Dowd is much more successful than Lebowski (he has played an important role in the Coens’ careers as indie filmmakers), but no less a creature of the moment. Both dudes depend on improvisation and inspiration much more than organization.

(from Roger Ebert’s review of The Big Lebowski)

We think funny and true go together better than serious and true…

We believe that the Dudeist tradition started as a response to the excesses of civilization. That was Lao Tzu’s deal anyway. Lots of similar traditions dealt with issues of work and status and anxiety and nature the same way. But they were all, pretty much, taken over by fascists and real reactionaries. Even Taoism was taken over by charlatans and phonies. But the pure undogmatic center of lots of traditions (Christianity, Vedism, Buddhism, etc.) is all the same. And that’s Dudeism.

(Oliver Benjamin, in an interview about his founding of Dudeism)

JEFF: There’s a little guy inside saying, You’re going to kick outta here pretty soon. You wanna do some stuff, and what you do will have consequences. Consequences are a kind of immortality. All the things that you love are going to change; you’re going to lose them one way or another.

BERNIE: It makes them all of a sudden very dear.

JEFF: Not only the things you love, but also the things you don’t love, because you know they’re going to go, too. I’m of the nature that I’ll get sick. I can feel my health going in a gentle kind of way, but it doesn’t bum me out so much. If I was younger, I think I would have reacted differently.

BERNIE: I’m of the nature that I will die. Imagine really grokking that when you’re younger. Imagine if we could live our whole life that way: Hey, I’m going to die, so let’s live! The things I’m surrounded by are going to change and disappear, so let me enjoy their beauty as they are right now.

(Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman, The Dude and the Zen Master)

An action-comedy book from 2025… for 2025

At a superficial level, if you’ve read one Carl Hiaasen novel, you’ve read them all. They’re pretty much all extended riffs on the “Florida Man” memes and jokes — except that the Florida Men in question eventually founder when they run up against clever, good-hearted people who decide This Stupidity and Avarice Will Not Stand.

But recently, Hiaasen’s targets have really gone off the rails in their quest to provide fresh material. His previous book, Squeeze Me, featured a thinly disguised erstwhile President code-named “Mastodon” by the Secret Service. The “Ahmet” featured in the passage below is a Secret Service agent who’d previously been on the First Lady’s protection detail; “Mockingbird” is that former First Lady’s code name; “the club” is the couple’s Palm Beach residence, called Cafe Bellicosa:

Ahmet had expected her to file for divorce, as they’d often discussed, so he’d been upset to hear that her “companionship contract” with Mastodon didn’t expire for another three years. Millions of dollars were at stake, Mockingbird had explained, not to mention the hefty performance bonuses. Every time she touched Mastodon’s right hand in a public setting, ten thousand dollars was deposited in her brokerage account at Morgan Stanley; a full five-finger entwinement was worth twenty grand. And to appear beside him at a formal function: forty thousand for the first sixty minutes, fifty-five for every hour after that.

“And how much do you get for a tug job?” Ahmet had snarled, jarringly out of character.

“No sex! Yuck! Never!” Mockingbird had protested, to no avail.

Now, in her new civilian life, she was swimming laps alone at the club, hoping her husband wasn’t watching from his third-floor suite. It was there he had hunkered like a wheezing badger for weeks after the messy expulsion from Washington. In the beginning he emerged only for golf and twice-weekly examinations by his urologist, who terminated their distasteful house call arrangement as soon as Mastodon ceased to be commander-in-chief. More recently the ex-president had been receiving visitors in private as he scrambled to revive his desiccated business empire. Occasionally he summoned his spouse upstairs for brunch and photographs with whatever Russian oligarch he was trying to bamboozle. Each time, Mockingbird would appear five minutes late, paste on her most unreadable smile, mechanically pick at a plate of cottage cheese topped with mango slices, and then retreat to her bedroom and vape herself comatose on a medical-grade indica called Ventilator Blue.

She was on her third lap of breaststrokes when she glanced up and saw Mastodon in his ungated bathrobe on the balcony.

I can’t do three more years, she thought. Not unless I get a way better contract.

(Squeeze Me was first published in 2018; in 2021, Hiaasen added a new epilogue, from which the above selection is excerpted. You can sense the author’s laughing but bitter relief between the lines.)

This year, in Fever Beach, Hiaasen is still hilarious… but also dead series. He’ss come loaded for bear, as the saying goes.

I’m still reading it, but the story so far centers on a money-making scheme by a corrupt Republican Congressman who puts me in mind of former Congressman Matt Gaetz: laughing, over-confident, artificially “dedicated patriot” Matt Gaetz. To kick off the scheme, he requires the assistance of a ragtag wannabe militia group who call themselves the Strokers for Liberty.1 The Strokers’ founder is a barely literate guy named Dale Figgo, and he’s backed up in most of his activities by his best friend and second-in-command Jonas Onus. Among Jonas’s other dissatisfactions with his life, he has never gotten over missing the January 6th riot at the US Capitol:

Jonas Onus had three children, all boys, with three different women. The kids had been born within a week of each other and Onus was the confirmed father, though he no longer bragged to strangers about his stallion-like fertility. The firefighter pension checks that once made him feel flush now seemed stingy and late-arriving. Having devoted his days of unearned retirement to the cause of white supremacy, he felt increasingly constrained by the demands of parenthood. He remained bitter about missing the January 6th insurrection—one of his brats had swallowed a baby turtle out of the terrarium and required emergency transport. The mother was on a girls’ trip to Universal, the cold bitch posting selfies from fucking Hogwarts while Onus stewed in front of the television in the ER waiting room, watching his brethren beat on the Capitol Police. That most of the rioters wound up indicted, jobless, and dead broke from legal bills did not diminish Onus’s remorse. He should have been up in Washington fighting side by side with the others! In fact, his bag had been packed and he was halfway to the door when the sitter had come flying down the stairs yelling that Jonas Jr. had inhaled that little river cooter like it was a goddamn Jolly Rancher.

As with The Big Lebowski, in Fever Beach you will find no prescriptions for how to resolve the giant real-world problems of 2025. All the relief you get is fictional.

But yes: you — we — need relief now and then. And if it comes in the form of even fictional common-sensical and decent protagonists successfully confronting evil-minded nincompoops, well, I’m of the opinion that’s so much the better. Keep your eye on the ball… but for gods’ sake take a load off now and then!

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Sunday is my one day a week to sleep in: no alarm clock for me, thank you very much. The downside of course is that my septuagenarian bladder doesn’t always recognize the calendar, let alone the difference, and wakes me up anyhow — and most often, right about when the alarm would’ve rung.

So it was this morning. But I worked hard not to wake up fully (squinty eyes, retaining the mental diffusion as much as possible), and when I got back into bed I fell asleep in pretty short order.

Fell asleep, and dreamt…:

I was in an office building of some kind. It felt like the second floor… But in any case, when I opened the door, I discovered something like an altercation going on right out there in the hall.

A burly guy in obviously law-enforcement-style garb was accosting a gentle little guy in short sleeves and a necktie.1

What do you want with me? asked the little guy. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. Why are you being this—

You don’t get to ask me questions, asshole! yelled the cop. I’m asking you. What are you doing here?!? He jabbed the little guy in the chest with a baton.

The exchange went back and forth for a few more seconds; it had drawn a small crowd of other office workers, who all had ambiguously worried looks on their faces — maybe the little guy in fact posed some kind of threat they just didn’t know about? But none of them seemed inclined to intercede, one way or another.

I surprised my dreamself by stepping between the two guys, facing the cop.

“I don’t know what you’re here for,” I said to him, “but you are going to leave this guy alone. He’s done nothing wrong that anyone here knows about, and we’ve all known him for years.” (I seemed pretty sure of this.)

The cop eyed me; he was plainly itching to use the baton on me, instead. “That right?” he said. “Just look at the guy — he’s obviously a person of interest! And who the hell are you for that matter?”

“I’m nobody, too,” I said. “My name is John E. Simpson.” I spelled it out for him. “It’s a good old Scottish name, and my branch of the clan goes back to nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The Foster side of the family goes back even further, to eighteenth-century New Jersey.” I glanced down at the nametag on his shirt — the surname wasn’t recognizable as even remotely human. “And unless I’m wrong, you, buddy, have a hell of a lot less claim than I do on a fellow American citizen.” I poked him in the chest.

He glared at me. Looked at the guy in the shirt and tie. Looked back at me…

…and left.

And then I woke up.

Now, obviously (I hope!), I’ve embellished the dialogue a bit: this is a much more detailed incident than I actually experienced in the dream. But it feels like the dream did.

I’ve been casting about for weeks, wondering what the heck I can do to help fellow citizens of Trump’s America. (See, e.g., this.) It occurs to me now, though, that I’ve got a tool I can use — and I don’t mean my damned Anglo-Saxon heritage. I mean I’ve got my voice: if I see anything remotely like this sort of scene playing out, I can simply… step in. Not raise my voice even to the meager level of aggression I displayed in the dream, but to simply, quietly, confront the aggressor and say: Not this victim, and not me, either. Be on your way.

I like to think I’ll have the cojones to do this, should it come to that. I hope it doesn’t. But I hope I can do it.

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What if activism isn’t “happening”?

To my shame, given my political views, I’m not much of an activist. (Is there such a thing as an inactivist?) This is partly a practical choice and partly a temperamental one:

• My lifelong hearing impairment doesn’t block me from participating in everyday affairs and conversation if I can go one-on-one with another party or two, but I’m useless — awkward, confused, ultimately immobilized and withdrawn — in multi-directional group settings, especially ones driven by spontaneity and unpredictability. And even, just, well, physically I’ll never qualify as a poster child for vigor — ever in my life, and certainly not in my 70s.

• Partially because of the hearing situation, I’ve never been particularly, um, social. I don’t mingle well. (Years ago, when I read and enjoyed loved Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, at one funny moment I remember thinking how glad I was to be reading it on a Kindle: if it’d been a physical book, a stranger might recognize the cover and attempt to strike up an enthusiastic conversation about it.) Online? Oh, sure — I’ll eagerly chatter away, back and forth, even with strangers. (I’m not by nature an arguer, but I pretty often openly disagree with others… although I labor over the wording so as not to come across as, y’know, actually disagreeable.) In any case, something about the physical presence of people I don’t know just drives me to the sidelines, not participating.

So how can I help resist a powerful, increasingly tyrannical, not even remotely reasonable or humane political movement?

I have no idea. “Moral support” feels like a pretty damned ineffectual sort of aid and comfort to people on the front lines. If I had a million bucks lying around, I’d happily turn it over to the cause(s)1, but my customary $5-a-month level of patronage, I’m sure, makes no dent at all.

So what can I do? Suggestions warmly welcomed!

In the absence of activism…

The 21st-century world offers plenty of escape hatches — ways to blow off steam, tricks to stop thinking about the conflagration.

In the blowing-off-steam category, there are of course plenty of sharp-thinking political commentators who say what I’m thinking, more effectively than I myself ever could.

Here on Substack, I most often turn to:

• Jeff Tiedrich’s everyone is entitled to my own opinion: Reading Tiedrich — who posts, with very rare exceptions, every single day, and almost always on politics — can be not only cathartic in a “I wish I could write like this” way, but also exhausting, because he’s so damned energetic about it all. (And I do wish he’d maybe devote a couple days a week to not mentioning Trump at all.)

• “JoJoFromJerz’s” Are you f’ing kidding me?: JoJo is the other side of the same political positions as Jeff Tiedrich — she doesn’t just take the other side as politically, socially, and intellectually unacceptable; she takes it as personally unacceptable. She makes frequent references to her family and personal history, which makes it easier to nod in empathy. (On the other hand, if you don’t share those life experiences — motherhood, abuse of one form or another, etc. — then she, too, can be a bit exhausting to read every day.)

• Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American: If some element of the political/governmental maelstrom has you very worried, even panicky, HCR won’t try to talk you down. But she’s 100% reliable in understanding why you’re right to feel that way. Of course, there’s a downside to regular confirmation of your pessimism, but it’s great to know you’ve got such level-headed, even-tempered company!

• Garrison Keillor and Friends: Keillor’s Substack presence is pretty much about what you might expect from the creator of A Prairie Home Companion, transplanted to the real world of 2025. He’s in his 80s now, and most often talks about what that means to him; he does nostalgia, and he does jokes and limericks about like you’d expect. Comfort food, right? But OMG is he ever on the mark about Trump and Company when he gets rolling…

I’ve also got favorites of a non-political nature, more along the lines of pure escapism (hello, Dave Barry!). Maybe I’ll write about them sometime.

But for now: what favorites are on your political Substack watchlist? Drop a comment below!

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Personal history, Presidential politics

Back in the 1980s, I was fairly active in a Methodist church in a town near the one where I lived. At that time, in that part of the country, that denomination (and our pastor) actively encouraged interest in and response to current events, particularly politics.

One of the hot-button issues of the day was nuclear disarmament.1 In response, our church started up a monthly study group to investigate the issues, large and small, and to take whatever (limited) action we could. We met on the last Friday of each month, and thus styled ourselves — because any “official” group of people needs a name, right? — the Last Friday Peacemakers, and we signed on to numerous “protests” associated not with full-scale nuclear disarmament, but with a nuclear freeze: a cessation in production of nuclear weapons and research into new ones.

Anyway, this all coincided roughly with the end of Ronald Reagan’s first term — that is to say, with his reelection campaign. The Soviet Union was still a thing then, with Gorbachev — famously “moderate” — in charge. Reagan had been a Cold Warrior for decades by then, and he didn’t want any part of “reconciliation” with them. He most notably laid out his feelings on the subject of a nuclear freeze in a 1983 address to a convention of evangelical Christians — the so-called “Evil Empire” speech. Here’s the heart of that speech:

I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. You know, I’ve always believed that old Screwtape2 reserved his best efforts for those of you in the Church. So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

Shortly before he gave that speech, though, we learned that Reagan would be making a campaign stop at a swanky restaurant in the tiny rural town where our church was located. It seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up… We could… we could… stand by the roadside and wave signs!

But even that tepid “protest action” felt like a bit much to one of the Peacemakers’ number. He was a teacher, a pillar of the community as they say, and he had a stentorian baritone voice. I’ve never forgotten the way he summed up his objections:

Whatever you think of his politics, you have to respect the man.

My mouth sort of fell open at that point. Because there are three things that (to me) summon up one response or another to a politician:

• Their office

• Their politics (i.e., policies)

• Their person

That’s in descending order of importance. Yes, in the case of a US President, the office itself deserves some modicum of respect; so too do their policies (making some allowances for differences of opinion, the need to navigate among wildly different constituencies, and so on).

As for respecting their person — well, like the expression says: that’s as may be. When I meet a stranger, yeah, I start with the assumption that they deserve some respect. But public persons are different, because we have records of the sort of person they’re obviously comfortable being. So my knowledge of Reagan’s person never, ever recovered from what I’d read of his response to the “Red scares” of the 1950s and on into the ’60s: his apparent willingness to walk away from — if not outright betray — friend- and partnerships in the interest of self-preservation. I didn’t care if he was happily married, didn’t care if he had a good sense of humor, and never bought into the “Great Communicator” label the media assigned him.

He’d been an unapologetic louse to his friends: that’s what I thought of his person.

So now, Trump…

Omigod, what an awful human being.

Omigod, what horrifying politics and policies.3

And as for his “office,” he’s done nothing but p!ss on it himself, from the phony gilding of the White House to his assumption — abetted by a craven Congress and an all-too-comfortable Supreme Court majority — that his 2024 electoral plurality somehow renders him unopposably right.

So, no, gods no: no respect at all from me for the man, his policies, or his office. He doesn’t care what I think of him, of course. But he also doesn’t care what you think of him, whoever you are. Just keep paying attention — and don’t get in my way. That’s it.

Shame on the media for enabling that to happen, and they’ve done it for decades. And now shame on us for continuing to participate in it.

…and yet…

The guy is pretty obviously falling apart, physically and mentally. If he were a “normal” 79-year-old, I’d say, okay, he’s entitled to deterioration. But he’s not at all normal — he was never normal, at any age — and his particular flavors of abnormality (in my opinion) entitle him to nothing else, from us or from life.

So I can’t help wondering: what’s next?

What I pretty much believe is happening: they — and you can define “they” however you want — are letting him fall apart. Maybe by now they’re actively encouraging it. They want him out of the way.

Because now they’ve got the frameworks of all their critical machinery in place. The only downside: they’ve got to fight all the public conflagrations Trump keeps igniting. They look forward to just getting on with the quiet work of dismantling the once-United States of America: of making “the law” apply equally to everyone with the following exceptions, and we’ll let you know when we come up with more.

And forget the 25th Amendment. (Read up on Section 4, for details.) The MAGA “majority” is even more illusory now than it was on Election Day 2024, but they’re still noisy, and as dangerous as a roomful of rabid weasels. No one, I fear, will do anything to actively intervene and risk stirring up what remains of those nutcases.

But if he just, well — listen, somebody’s got to say it — if he just gets out of the way, just dies, well then boy howdy: good old JD will step up! (Probably his first official act: declaring a Year of National Mourning, during which Congress and the courts will be in recess.)

So yeah: I wish Trump were gone. I wish Trump had never existed in the first place.

But goddammit, I do not at all look forward to his passing.

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I thought I’d start this new series on politics and culture by laying out my own general views. I’ve never made a secret of them, and people who know me pretty much know where I’m coming from anyhow. But as a courtesy to strangers, here goes…

The Parable of the Mad Cat

My wife and I began our life together in a rented ranch-style house in North Florida, on a quiet street at the fringes of a gigantic state university campus. The backyard was often overgrown — there was even a stand of bamboo — and beyond the yard was a small wooded area. On the far side of this wood, catering to college students, were numerous apartment complexes and a shopping center.

Now, it’s not true of all or even most college students that they can be really, really dumb about some things. But it is true of some college students, and in particular, this minority can be very deeply dumb about animals — that is to say, pets.

Over the seven years we lived in this house, we observed something every six months or so: an influx to the backyard of stray house pets — specifically, cats. They were generally tame, but fearful: obviously “freed” by their former owners at the end of the most recent semester. By far most of these would appear and be gone within a few hours or day, maybe adopted by neighbors and maybe lost to whatever else lived in those woods. (North Florida woods are home to lots of things that can kill humans, let alone wee fluffy beasties weighing mere pounds.)

But one family of cats — starting with a single pregnant female we came to call Mom, for obvious reasons — hung around, and hung around… and grew.

Mom and her multiple litters never really became “tame.” When we went out onto the brick patio, they scattered, watching us from a distance mainly (I think) to see what food or water we had on offer. And the ones we recognized eventually wandered off (again) to the woods or neighbors’ houses. In the meantime, we spent a fortune on spaying and neutering newborns, which we’d then release outside1, but Mom (for a long time) resisted capture; she was just too guarded. Eventually we did catch Mom herself, had her fixed, and that was that: we had Mom, and about four or five of her young, neutered offspring.

Everything was happy out there. The kittens would play, climb the giant live oak tree growing up through the bricks, doze on the patio, sometimes tiptoe to the back door to peek in at our three indoor cats, and then flee to the hinterlands if we moved towards the door. Mom would lie in the shade, regarding them fondly, sometimes washing them…

And then one day, horror came to call.

It took the form of a sizable gray feral cat, which expressed no interest in Mom for mating or anything else, but went straight for the kittens — apparently, as potential sources of food. When we first saw it, it was chasing one of them up the live oak: a delicate, pure white little thing which The Missus had dubbed “Princess.” Just as Princess reached a large fork in the branches, about six feet up, the big gray grabbed one of her back legs and started dragging her down the tree.

My wife and I — especially her — pretty much exploded. She ran out the back door with a broom, screaming You get out of here! and whacking at the monster. Of course it was a coward; it released Princess, and fled to the woods.

First things first: we got Princess to the vet. (He had to more or less rebuild the injured leg; it looked like a plucked and scalded chicken wing until her fur grew back.) When we got home, we decided to keep her indoors for a while to let the leg heal as much as possible, but knew we’d eventually have to release her again… In the meantime, what about the rest of them?

They were gone, having run away in terror either from the gray cat or from my wife, or from both. We figured they’d come back, and we were right, but first we had to deal with the monster.

I set out a Havaheart trap, baited it with the contents of a can of tuna, and then we waited. It didn’t take long. We trapped the homicidal maniac within just a couple hours, and we let him stay out there overnight. The next morning, I draped a padded moving blanket over the trap, carried it to the car as the thing inside howled and grabbed at the blanket through the bars of the cage, the whole insane burden lurching in my arms. Off I went to the city’s animal shelter to leave him there, telling the staff to wear heavy gloves, but please to simply dispose of him.

It was the only time we ever did something like that with an animal. And — speaking for myself — I never thought twice about it.

The Lessons of the Mad Cat

I have thought from time to time about that big gray cat, though. He makes for a compelling metaphor…

The folks at the far extremes of the left-to-right political spectrum are a mystery to me; their “answers” to ills real and imagined just don’t align with anything like the reality I see every day, and over the long haul.

And I can’t change anything about them, anyhow. I can “control” only myself.2 And I or anyone lives can be boiled down to one of only two worldviews, I think, which taken to their extremes sound roughly like this:

• A world in which we have family and friends dealing with trouble as best as we can, knowing full well that some troubles are unavoidable, and some even insurmountable.
  …or

• A world in which we, with our family and friends, prevent any trouble — even any threat of trouble — from happening at all.

That second extreme world is attractive — seductive, even — but it’s wholly illusory. There is no such universe.

And even if there were such a universe, I wouldn’t want to live in it. It would be a universe of everyone for themselves, of paranoia, of unending and exhausting competition and battle, of (yes) lunatic gray cats whose appetites and frenzies endanger not only everyone else, but themselves as well. Give me instead the real world: ever changing, adapting, variegating, absorbing blows and dealing with evils, mourning when necessary, yearning for stability, but finally moving on to the next thing, whatever it is.

Hence: lefty for me. Oh, yeah. Lefty all along the (non-extreme) spectrum.

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