Another week, another target-rich environment re: mockable political figures.
Let’s start with Que Mala Harris and the well-known fable of the frog in the boiling water.
Everyone who read that last sentence knows the fable. And everyone who has thought about it for eight seconds knows that it’s not even true: any frog who can escape from either quickly boiling or gradually boiling water will do so.
Because it’s a tired old trope AND untrue, you should never use it in a public address. But if you do use it, you don’t need to explain the hell out of it … because EVERYBODY already knows!
So naturally, since that fable is a banal cliché, Que Mala – who double majored in banal cliches and Willie-Brown-servicing – decided to tell the boiling frog tale several days ago. And because she is Que Mala, she made it into a Russian-novel-length slog.
First, she gave an unnecessary introduction: “I think of those two frogs. You know the two frogs in the two pots? So, for your listeners, here it goes…”
Yes, here it goes. Please take a lot of time to explain to us a fable that requires no explanation. And if possible, try to work in Venn diagrams, the significance of the passage of time, and a yellow school bus.
Said no audience ever.
After meandering through the story, she finally arrived at the end: “The lesson there, as far as I’m concerned… don’t be that first frog.”
As far as you’re concerned?! This isn’t a treatise on quantum physics that requires your nuanced interpretation! It’s a beaten-to-death-horse waste of verbiage that any first-grade class would roll their eyes at.
Every time I see Que Mala speak, I’m reminded of the comedian Louis CK’s bit on his wife’s inability to tell a straightforward, coherent story. (Spoiler alert: they’ve since divorced.) He lampoons the way she starts a sentence, but then branches off into one verbal box canyon after another, until no one is able to follow.
I find myself muttering his final response whenever I accidentally catch any of Que Mala’s mind-numbing attempts at communication: “Have some consideration for the f***ing listener!”
Speaking of skeevy dimwits – and we just were – have you heard the latest attack on Casey DeSantis?
It seems she was at a public event supporting her husband, and she wore a jacket with the state of Florida and an alligator depicted on the back.
Enter Marvin Dunn, an octogenarian racial arsonist and former Psychology professor who fancies himself a “historian and organizer.” Does he constantly call himself “Dr.” on all of his social media and in all public utterances, just like “Dr.” Jill Biden?
You bet he does.
(And yes, I too am a former professor. But whenever someone recognizes me in public and points at me and says, “Hilarious Genius!” I never hold up a hand and say, “That’s DR. Hilarious Genius to you.” I just sign an autograph and accept compliments, and then go on about my day, humbly making the world a better place.)
Anyway, DR. Dunn took to his Twitter account, posting side-by-side pics of Casey’s jacket and a creepy old postcard showing an alligator in front of two black children. His message: “Florida’s First Lady makes a racist fashion statement. Black babies as alligator bait was a theme in racist Florida humor of the early 1900s. It’s an inside joke. If you are not from Florida, you may not get it. She does. Do you?”
Now Casey’s jacket didn’t have any black babies on it. Just an alligator, an outline of Florida, and the words, “Where woke goes to die.”
And it turns out that black-baby-less references to alligators are pretty common in these parts.
The alligator is the state reptile. The yearly drag race in our town is called the Gator Nationals. The mascot of the finest university in the state – and coincidentally, the institution which granted me the PhD that entitles me to be called Doctor, but which I never insist on, because I am not a narcissistic d-bag – is the Gator.
Our town is plastered with all manner of Gator iconography and imagery, and yet zero percent of those Gators are depicted with black babies, or eating black babies, or even looking hungrily at black babies.
But DR. Whitey-hater Dunn knows the truth. He hears all the dog whistles, and he can spot an arcane reference to an obscure, century-old postcard that has nothing to do with anyone alive today, even when it’s not there.
I’m surprised that racist old jerk isn’t in congress! Or at least on MSNBC, or the View.
Speaking of idiots in congress, the congressional Dems hit a new low this week, when they cheered for congenital McCarthy-ite liar Adam Schiff when he was rightly censured for repeatedly touting the Russia hoax, and claiming to have evidence that it was true.
Evidence which, as luck would have it, he was somehow never able to produce.
I understand politicians circling the wagons to protect reprobate members of their own party, when doing so is in their petty self-interest. The Dems have rallied around mentally compromised senators (Fetterman, Feinstein), virulent anti-Semites (Omar, Tlaib), and morons (most of the rest of them). Republicans are slow-walking the eventual ouster of ridiculous liar George Santos.
But there’s a difference between sheepishly refusing to boot a bum because he’s YOUR bum, and actually cheering for one, in the House, for all the world to see.
That’s what the Democrats did last week. When the GOP voted to censure the execrable Schiff, everyone in both parties knew that he richly deserved it, for spending years abusing his power and running corrupt, dishonest investigations.
It’s bad enough that not a single Democrat voted his conscience on the censure vote, which was sure to pass, regardless. But to cheer him and chant his name, while he received his justified rebuke?
Congressional Democrats disgraced themselves, and they should never have another majority in the House until every member who cheered for Adam Schiff’s serial lying is gone.
Finally, the media frenzy about the imploded sub story drew me in too, for several reasons.
First, I’ve always been creeped out by dark, deep water, so I can’t imagine ever getting into a tiny sub like that. And if I had ever been tempted that way, finding out that the sub was operated by a video game controller would elicit a hard pass! Even without the benefit of hindsight, it seems foolhardy beyond belief that people would take that trip.
On the other hand, I have a grudging admiration for extreme adventurers, even as “extreme adventurers” often seems to be synonymic of “foolhardy beyond belief.” And the Titanic story has always fascinated me, so if there ever was a reason to travel to the ocean floor, seeing the final resting place of the great ship would be it.
The initial stories about the mini-sub possibly being lost at sea with the oxygen slowly running out created a horrific picture worthy of a Poe story: five people crammed into a tiny metal coffin, pinned to the ocean floor by immense pressure, in complete darkness, as they slowly smothered to death?
The skin crawls at the thought. And even though the reality of their fate – an instant implosion of the sub, with all on board dead before they knew what hit them – is not exactly a happy ending, it is merciful by comparison.
But I found the darkness of many peoples’ reactions to the story to be as unsettling as the darkness of the ocean depths. I’m thinking especially of all of the sickos who were absolutely gleeful over those five souls’ predicament, just because they were rich.
There’s a reason that envy is one of the seven deadly sins. (By the way, happy Pride Month!) It’s very tempting to hate rich people, especially when we’re comparatively poor, just as it’s easy to hate the attractive when we’re ugly, or the athletic when we’re graceless.
Or the exotic Native Americans, when we’re pale and inauthentic Elizabeth Warren. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
It’s one thing if a particular rich person’s wealth is ill-gotten – from being a criminal, or a con-man, or a corrupt politician. (But I repeat myself.) But to harbor a mean-spirited spite – to the point of cheering their impending death – for anyone who has done better than we have is a soul-withering exercise!
I wish that the people who celebrated what they thought was the slow, tortuous death of the five people on that sub would catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, and experience even a passing redemptive moment of shame at what they’re becoming.
Ugh. Rather than end on that sour note, I’ll close by recommending a great poem, written by Thomas Hardy in 1912, on the subject of the Titanic’s sinking. It’s called “The Convergence of the Twain,” and you can easily find the text online.
It’s short – just 33 lines, divided over 11 stanzas – and I always enjoyed teaching it to non-English majors, because of its dramatic subject matter, and its fairly accessible metaphors and imagery. (In particular, he suggests a darkly inverted “marriage” of the iceberg and the ship; the “convergence” of the title refers to the moment when ship and ice come together as one.)
Hardy starts by imagining the Titanic in its eerie, final resting place, and then shifts back in time to when the “unsinkable” ship was being built. He foreshadows the disaster with a chilling juxtaposition of humans creating Titanic in a crowded shipyard, while Nature is simultaneously creating the iceberg in the huge, empty ocean.
Here are my favorite 3 stanzas:
“VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.”
That last line always gets me!
Especially when watching our current political class blithely driving our country toward disaster, the doomed ship’s fate seems depressingly relevant.
Biden delenda est!
“Dr.” Jill Biden/ “Dr.” Marvin Dunn, 2024!
Martin Simpson 