Well, after some help from muscle relaxers, I’m a little sore, but recovered from my battle with 27 bags of concrete. I even felt up to lifting weights today. (My secret is that I don’t lift very heavy weights and not for very long! I recommend that for everyone.)
And by the way, since I was out of the loop for a bit, I didn’t have the chance to read your responses to my Monday column. But I’ve seen them now, and you people are getting funnier and more insightful with each passing day. Possibly because America is back, baby!
How back are we?
Consider this: about 18 months ago our SecDef was going AWOL without telling anyone, and when he did show up, he walked around in a pointless covid mask like an idiot. He looked like someone heading up a military that you could fight to a draw with a few platoons of menopausal lesbian Gender Studies majors armed with 100 old rifles and one Maxine Waters, whose hideous, Medusa-esque face could turn many of our soldiers to stone if they were unlucky enough to gaze upon it.
Most of our military recruitment ads featured nonbinary oddballs talking about their pronouns, and petite female soldiers explaining that watching their two moms get married taught them patriotism, or something.
Strangely enough, none of the military branches were reaching their recruitment goals.
Unexpectedly!
But even before the Trumpkrieg™ officially started, December’s recruitment numbers reached a 12-year high, and then January’s numbers hit a 15-year high. And our new SecDef thinks that the military is for breaking things and killing bad guys, rather than going on a journey of gender-conscious self-fulfillment.
Plus he’s got cool Christian tattoos with Latin phrases that scare neurotic, pretendian Massachusetts senators. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
And I just saw one of the new military recruitment ads, this one a 9-second spot for the Army.
“But Martin,” you may be asking, “how can a 9-second ad tell the inspiring biographical tale of a community-organizing social justice warrior’s personal journey to become a multiply-facial-pierced, blue-haired Army man/woman?”
Exactly. It can’t.
Here’s what it has instead:
A Jack Reacher-looking dude (the new one, not Tom Cruise) stacking plates on to each end of a barbell; then a close-up on his forearm, which has the word “TERROR” tattooed on it in big black letters; then a few seconds of him lifting weights that look like the equivalent of 27 sixty-pound bags of concrete.
Then a shot of him with his muscular arms folded across his chest, as he says a line more Eastwoodian than Eastwood: “Stronger people are harder to kill.”
Nine seconds. One big, strong, bad-ass soldier who looks like he might have chunks of jihadi fighters in his stool. And a line that somehow sounds like it should be coming out of Arnold in his Conan the Barbarian phase.
THAT’S how back we are!
In other news, as I was enjoying relaxed muscles and sifting through some of the stream of good news on the internet yesterday, I discovered that some marketer’s algorithm is off, because I got a pop-up ad with a page of pro-leftist products that were clearly made before the election.
They were great fun to look through, because they have not aged well.
For example, three months after Trump got re-elected, somebody is still trying to sell hats, mugs and hoodies with the message, “No, Really. HE LOST & you’re in a cult” on them. Good news for any lefties out there though: they’re marked WAY down!
Unexpectedly!
On the same page there’s a t-shirt with three lines and images: At the top it says LOSERS, with the words “in 1865” and a confederate flag beside it. In the middle it says LOSERS, with the words “in 1945” and a swastika flag beside it, and on the bottom is says LOSERS, with the words “in 2020” and a MAGA cap beside it.
It’s fun to imagine a depressed leftist looking at his shirt that used to be so fun to wear, and crying in his kale smoothie. Because anytime he tries to wear it in public now, people keep pointing out the slave-holding confederates were Democrats, and the Nazis were socialists, and the MAGA hat wearers are back in the driver’s seat.
The site also listed a shirt for sale that said, “Unless your ancestors look like this” over a pic of four Indians on horseback, and “You’re probably an immigrant” underneath.
Guess what, Howard Zinn: those injuns came across the Bering strait way back when Imhotep Pelosi was barely 300 years old. You might even say that they “immigrated” here…because they did.
So stop your whining, Dances with Entitlement, because you forgot the third law of military strategy (right after “Never start a land war in Asia,” and “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.”): “FA with Manifest Destiny and FO.”
However, if someone wants to remake that shirt with four photoshopped images of Grandma Squanto on those horses, I’ll buy a gross of them.
And yes, you can insert your own, “Liz Warren puts the ‘gross’ in 144 t-shirts” joke here.
#neverstop
Finally, the Grammys were held two Sundays ago, and I didn’t comment on them, because I don’t watch the Grammys. But I saw a montage of moments from them that brought out the “Get off my lawn!” old man in me.
Or should I say the, “Music these days is terrible!” old man in me.
Here’s my review:
Alicia Keys won something, and made a stupid little speech that included, “DEI is not a threat, it’s a gift!” Okay. Return to sender.
Lady Gaga (dressed as Wednesday Adams) said, “Trans people are not invisible.”
No kidding. In fact, they’re super visible. “Hey,” you might say, from four blocks away, “is that 1974 Dick Butkus in a tutu and tiara lumbering our way? Because I haven’t seen anybody that visible since J.B. Pritzker passed by and accidentally blotted out the sun.”
#putdownthatcomicallyoversizedturkeyleg
Beyonce won “Best Country Album of the Year.” That super loud humming sound you heard was Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Dwight Yoakam spinning in their graves. And Dwight is still alive!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to a few Lucinda Williams songs, starting with “Jackson.” And by the time I’m two lines into the first verse (“Once I get to Lafayette, I’m not gonna mind one bit”) I’ll have heard more actual country than Beyonce is going to sing in her entire life.
Hogg/Warren 2028!
Martin Simpson 