I had a great Christmas, as I hope you all did! I know that the CO site attracts new readers all the time, so as this year comes to a close, I thought I’d take a look back at my columns from 2021, and pick some of my favorite thoughts from this challenging year.
I’ll break the year up into three parts, and post three “best-of” columns this week.
In January all of us struggled with the ascendance of the Democrat party to control of the WH and both houses of Congress. Even in those dark days, I tried to find a silver lining.
Just a week into the new year, I made a prescient – if I do say so myself — prediction: “The Dems are such horrific politicians that they are going to over-reach and alienate all but their hard-core base, and to the extent that we can have even fair-ish congressional elections in the future, they should be sailing into a serious repudiation in the mid-terms, a la Obama’s 56-seat House bloodbath in 2010.
Biden has one orthopedic shoe in the grave, and Comma La is a human toothache, and all of the faces of the national Democrat party look like the Elephant Man’s family reunion, morally speaking. They are not going to wear well.
If they were even room-temperature smart, they could do much more damage by posing as unifiers and throwing a few, pitiful bones to the spineless GOP members who always seem happy for even the most meager of scraps. Instead, they are so driven by their own malice that they can’t help themselves: they’re going to double-down on their frothing hatreds, and pursue their “enemies” (i.e. half of the country). Anyone who is not a completely lost cause is going to be repelled by that.”
A few weeks later, I didn’t have the heart to watch Biden’s inauguration, so I distracted myself with some analysis of the historical arc of presidential inauguration poetry, and tried my hand at it:
“And by the way, you can track America’s decline through the quality of poetry associated with presidents. Walt Whitman wrote four poems about the death of Lincoln (among them “O Captain, My Captain” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) that are still worth reading today.
Gifted poet Robert Frost read his poem, “The Gift Outright” at JFK’s inauguration.
Over 30 years later, mediocre poet (at best) Maya Angelou wrote a mediocre piece for Bill Clinton’s inauguration. It is justifiably forgotten now, but I remember banal repetitions of “a rock, a river, and a tree.” Poetry interpretation is subjective, but my take was that Slick Willie liked to take his interns to picnic at a river, where he was hard as a rock and they ended up climbing a tree to get away from him.
But I’m more of a prose guy, so that might be way off.
Anyway, Biden’s inaugural poem was delivered by an unknown young woman, and of course the media is now swooning over her, and she’ll probably get rich and famous over this “poem.”
But, to paraphrase a line attributed to Dorothy Parker, this isn’t a poem to be set aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Here are three consecutive lines from the poem, chosen at random:
“We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.
And the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it.”
Off the top of my head: “the belly of the beast” is a tired cliché; “beast” and “peace” don’t rhyme; “just is” and “justice” don’t rhyme; the third line changes verb tense in a way that doesn’t make sense. (By the way, my last sentence rhymed better than anything in this terrible poem.) Also, there is no referent for the “it” in the last line – what can that line possibly mean?
On the other hand, “knew it” and “do it” at least rhyme, even if they are stupid.
Good lord! At the rate we’re going, if Comma-la manages to get re-elected in 2024, her inaugural poem is going to start with, “There once was a man from Nantucket.”
I know that some of you are probably thinking, “Sure, Martin, you may be a hilarious genius, an amazing father and husband, and a role model for us all, not to mention a fine figure of a man. But you’re no poet, and you probably couldn’t do any better.”
To which I say, hold my Scotch and stand back, as I compose a poem – live, right now, this very minute — that is more fitting for the inauguration of Joe Biden than the actual putrid poem above:
Ode to Joe
C’mon man, he’s got a plan.
Look fat– don’t question that.
You know, the thing,
Ring a ding ding.
He defeated Corn Pop
Zippity boop bop.
Don’t give him a quiz:
He don’t know where he is.
Stay in your lanes
Or he’ll put y’all back in chains.
Even Frank Luntz
Knows he’s a dunce.
Boom! Admit it: you feel pretty foolish right now for doubting me. Because that poem has all the hallmarks of deathless verse: the lines all rhyme, it works on multiple levels, and it contains a subtle allusion to Frank Luntz.
Where was I? Oh yeah, our long national nightmare, just getting started…”
In February, I found one happy-ending story to brighten my spirits:
“In the feel-good story of February, Breitbart’s headline caught my eye: “Accidental Blast During Bomb-Making Class Kills 30 Taliban Fighters.”
It seems that a clot of happy-go-lucky jihadis had gathered in a mosque (where else?) in the Afghan village of Qultaq to learn the finer points of blowing people up. Even though the crowd included “six foreign nationals who were expert mine makers,” it apparently also included at least one dim-witted lummox who hadn’t yet gotten to the Koranic verses on the subject of, “Don’t touch that wire!”
(Preliminary reports that the dullard in question was one Ahmed al-Biden have not been confirmed.)
The story notes that jihadis fairly regularly experience such mortifying examples of the male scourge of premature detonation. (HA!) For example, “a similar blast occurred at a mosque in Balkh’s Chahabar Bolak district in August.”
Also in the village of Sikandar Khel, and earlier in the Ghazni district, and in the southern province of Zabul.
So what can we learn from this hilarious vignette?
First, all Afghan place names have apparently been translated from the original Klingon.
Second, one way to promote the idea that your religion is super peaceful might be to stop using your places of worship as combination ammo dumps/demolition schools.
Third, don’t be discouraged, jihadis! Remember the sura that goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try– KA-BLAM!”
In March, the lefties of Seattle provided another cause for mirth:
“Seattle, fresh from months of encouraging subliterate, mouth-breathing Biden voters to destroy their city, has come up with a use for all of the taxpayer money they are saving by not employing cops. Their DESC – which, though you might assume it stands for “Depraved Execrable Sinister Cretins“ actually stands for “Downtown Emergency Services Center” – has produced two handy flyers targeting a core element of the Democrat voting base: incorrigible drug addicts.
The first flyer advocates smoking heroin, rather than injecting it. Because – and I cannot stress enough how I am NOT making this up – “smoking is a lower-risk alternative to injection. Give it a try!”
Yes, by all means, give it a try!
Your city is a burned-out husk, and you’ve lost any chance at employment now that every sane business owner has fled the feral leftist hordes vandalizing what used to be their businesses. So it’s not like you have anything better to do than smoking some heroin.
But wait! The second taxpayer-funded flyer proposes an even better way to get your heroin fix than shooting or smoking it: sticking it up your arse.
Again, on my honor as a hilarious genius and a gentleman: I am not making this up.
This actually-existing flyer introduces the charming phrase “booty bumping.”
If you’re anything like me – and what a sweet world that would be! — when you first heard “booty bumping” you probably thought that it was a euphemistic reference to the way in which Comma-La started her political career in CA. Or, possibly, what the nascent Biden administration has already started doing to the gullible American citizens who voted for Joey Gaffes because they believed he was a “moderate.”
But no. The flyer educates Seattle-ites that the rectum is “very efficient at absorption.” So cue the NBC “The More you Know” musical theme on that one.
It goes on to say that introducing heroin into yourself rectally “is a good choice if your veins are hard to hit,” and that, “it doesn’t leave tracks.”
Skid marks, probably. But no tracks. So you’ll have that going for you.
That’s it in a nutshell, folks. Socrates suggested that the unexamined life is not worth living. Christ advocates treating others as you would be treated. The Founding Fathers urged us toward the highest use of our Creator-endowed liberties and faculties.
But the Democrats who run Seattle have their own words to live by: “Sticking heroin up your butt: Give it a try!”
I also took solace in an April story that involved animals and karma: “[This] story comes to us out of India, the colorful land of unpronounceable and unspellable names, friendly tech support folks who implausible claim to be named either “Andrew” or “Emily,” and hilarious cartoon characters who can no longer be voiced by white actors. Because racism.
But if I asked you what country you associate with cock fighting – and if anybody even thinks about making a joke about any Dem politician, fundraiser, or supporter who definitely did not kill himself in prison, I will turn this car RIGHT around, mister! – most of you would say “Mexico.”
And then you’d be cancelled.
Because, as I may have mentioned before, racism.
Anyway, it turns out that Indians also fancy the occasional cockfight. But sadly, there is now one less Indian fan of what, for all I know, they call “the sport of kings” in India. Because last month, 45-year-old Thangulla “Hello, I’m Andrew, what can I help you with today?” Satish was killed by a fighting cock.
Not because they were in the ring – or the cage, or the pen, or the rink, or whatever they call a cockfighting enclosure in India – as opponents in a bout sanctioned by the ICFA (the Indian Cockfighting Association, duh).
It turns out that Thangulla (and if you just thought “Matata,” you are not alone) owned the bird in question, and was preparing him for the fight by strapping a 3-inch long, razor-sharp blade to the rooster’s leg.
I know: what could possibly go wrong?
Well it turns out that the rooster fatally slashed his owner. And before I can ask the rhetorical question, “Where would you LEAST like to be slashed by the knife on your fighting rooster’s le—” every male reading this column just shouted out, “GROIN!”
Allow me to introduce a quote from the story by turning toward the big board and doing my Richard Dawson impression: “Survey says…”
“A man who tied a knife to the leg of his rooster for an illegal cockfight was killed after the bird panicked and stabbed him in the groin…”
Yada yada yada, Thangulla bled out.
This quote should elicit several immediate thoughts:
1.HA! HAHAHA! HAHAHAHA!
2. If at your funeral, one of your neighbors asks your family how you died, and they mumble, “He suffered a fatal groin injury in a cockfight,” those neighbors are going to wonder if you had badly misunderstood how a cockfight is supposed to work.
3. The bird “panicked” and then stabbed him? Really?
If you were a rooster and your owner took you for a drive down to the local rooster rink, and you found yourself staring at a ‘roided up rooster who looked like a cross between John Cena and Mick Jagger, and you turned to your owner and said, “Andrew, what’s going on here?” And your owner said, “I’ll explain in a minute. But first I’m going to attach these razor-sharp blades to your legs.”
Do you really think your traitorous owner would die because you “panicked?”
Because I’m thinking that the rooster would give his owner the same narrowed-eyed, baleful stare that the giant rooster who regularly fights Peter Griffin on Family Guy gives him right before things kick off.
In other words, I think that it was cold-blooded murder!
Cue the “Etymology Minute” theme song: “And THAT’s the origin of the phrase, to “cold cock” someone. (Boom! Dad joke catches you like a crisp jab when your arms were down to protect your ribs.)
Anyway, I hate cruelty to animals, so that story makes me laugh.”
Coming next: May through July
Martin Simpson 