Overloaded with politics and the contemptible collection of low creatures whence we must choose come November, maybe it is time to discuss something good and decent and pure: Snakes.
For a short while a couple of days ago it seemed that it might — just might — be possible for a person of conscience to vote for Donald Trump. But then . . .
Over the weekend I happened upon an online conversation about a small and specialized computer program, and was surprised to find something vanishingly rare in internet discourse: good sense.
With every new disclosure we learn of some new falsehood told us about the creation, effects, and supposed control of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the COVID-19 disease it causes, and the stuff that was marketed as a “vaccines.”
I could have written this column, regardless of the outcome. Half the country has put its hopes in an all too human “savior.” Half the country has put its hopes on the defeat of that man. Today marks either a celebration or a catastrophe if one’s hopes rest on the state of President Trump. That tells more of our false hopes than anything else.
Those of us who have watched what currently passes for news know in absurd detail all we could ever hope to know about the trial of a former president for the lone financial offense of which he is arguably not guilty. What we don’t know about, because it has received practically no coverage, is 7 million cases of apparent homicide. Could be murder, could be manslaughter. We don’t know, and our media are not interested in finding out.
In a parallel universe last week, Iranian drones and missiles were launched against two pro-Western democracies. The same two that received those volleys in our universe; just one bit was different in Universe Two: there, the West scrambled jets to protect Ukraine, leaving Israel to fend for itself.
Gee. Every month people in the financial industry predict that inflation will go down. Almost every month, inflation doesn’t go down. Turmoil in the markets results. It is worth remembering that brokerage houses make money when you buy a security, but they also make money when you sell a security.
And so we turn to fairytales. I don’t mean the softened modern children’s story versions, but the hard-core, often brutal originals. They usually don’t have any moral: they’re not fables. Instead, they are fanciful stories that occasionally go in the direction of fable, often in the direction of religion, sometimes taking us nowhere but a place of fear and bleak despair. They are more sophisticated versions of campfire ghost stories.