Art by Andrew Nicholls

~I love this shot for many difficult reasons.~

Well besides Nazis Kluxers, and folks with red caps rioting against the Quarantine. We're all just sitting here,...and sitting. 

...and sitting.

It occurred to me. What if back when I was seeing a shrink. Actually I was seeing two. Long story. What if one of them fell asleep on me. 
This while I'm spilling my guts about the stupid boring traumatic horrors of my existence.

What's the etiquette for that?

This sounds like a problem Thurber would have made a cartoon for in a 1928 New Yorker. Still what to do? 
Does one leave, and if you do should you pour pancake syrup into his lap? Which you always carry which is one of your problems. Deduct his nap time? Perhaps also go to sleep, and then compare dreams?

And another thing. 
What if I really was abducted with my aunt by them space guys from her back yard in 1956. It sure seemed real at the time. 
Even bleeping realer when they flew over our house in 1967. 

Then there's all that Angel, and Demon stuff that went on when I was going to catholic school as a kid,...that noise looked pretty 3-D at the time. I ever tell you the story of the statue of Saint Teresa in our church waking up, and telling some of the kids to, "...Pray". 

That was my first X File. 

The Church hates it when that happens. 
It was a big deal the bleeping bishop even showed up, and ordered the whole school Nuns everybody never to talk about it again. 

Which is why you never heard of it.
They were freaked. It something when you're a kid, and you see adults lose their shit. Being kids they forgot,...being a weirdo I didn't.

This is the thing about being so much closer to 100 than 20. 
You have tons of stuff in your head, and now loads of time to think about it. My film reviewer friend the late Paul Wunder always said,... "Everyone has at least one good script in them. One more or less decent movie up their sleeves."

Pretty much.

Jared Kushner White House advisor sez the U.S. response to the COVID Virus is, 

"...A great success story". 

Trying to look at this from outside our culture war divisions. 

From the view of say a person from Toga,...see Great Seal above. 

If I were from that Kingdom...I think it's a monarchy. 

Even taking Kushner's point of view. 

What actual facts gives him this conclusion? 

Also accepting that in his position he has to seem optimistic,...understandable. 

However what facts does he have to be 'that' positive. 

Granted he could be just an oblivious "...Putz" insolated from the realities most contend with. 

However on the very remote chance he's not,...what facts give him this bright opinion.

I was out to market, and one of those long accordion buses went by. They can at max hold near 100. 
Besides the driver I saw one guy in there. 
If I were a real writer I would have flagged the thing down, and asked both of them 

"...What the fuck are you guys doing in here?" 

...figured they'd have stories.

See below,...they do have stories.

They think the Virus is political like Gay Wedding Cakes.

They exposed themselves, and families to the pandemic

at their demos. Darwin as always will have the last

word on them, and theirs.

I should be sorry for them I wish I could be. 

However these are exactly the sort that would 

shove me chained into an oven.

So fuck'em

The can slowly roast in Hell.

With the absence of any Federal plan for dealing with the Pandemic. 

The National regions have formed their own organizations. 

These are in effect the embryonic establishments of independent Nations. 

This map is not science fiction. 

It was made necessary by the actions or lack there of  by #45. 

We are back where we started in 1781 with the Articles of Confederation.

...before the Constitution. 

Maybe we don't need a federal government. 

Click to enlarge.

You'll get an eyeful.

Read this piece from the Salon.

https://www.salon.com/2020/04/29/back-to-the-future-governors-outflank-trump-with-a-new-articles-of-confederation/

"...also"

Like everyone I'm going out of my mind.

I can almost understand the Kluxer Nazis that

want to reopen everything.

However the sane have to hold out till the Vaccine.

That or we just spread more death.

I spend my days listening to 50's~60's Do Wop.

That, and cleaning my digs.

Endlessly mopping dusting polishing.

Polishing the polish. 

These days even plastering, and painting.

Eh,....Koharu above helps out.

Also I'm tired as in real fucking tired all the time.

Is this a symptom or am I just fed the fuck up?

I listened to the below all morning over, and over.

It helped.

Dr. Fauci warns a Second Wave is certain, but bored Americans want to have fun. Also CEO's want their big bucks, and that moron attempted rapist child cager #45 thinks a big reopen will get him re-elected. 

...probably will.

Anyway Doc Fauci sez there 'will' be a price for them bucks fun, and election. A deadly Second Wave...which was coming anyway tho' now it'll be bigger. Our owners don't care, and the owned neither,...them illiterate Nazis just want to go out, and get drunk or have their hair done.

Yep life in da U.S. of A.

We deserve everything that's happening to us. 
Btw the meat you eat from now on will be infected with the Virus. This as #45 signed an order keeping all the plants open. He also signed an order making it impossible for the plant workers or any essential workers to sue their employers for making them work in infected environments.

Ain't that some shit.

Yeah life is good.
Here in da land of the broke owned infected, and astoundingly stupid.

Bob da Bunny whom like all fictional characters is immune,…well to everything,

…even time. Anyway he went to Coney Island in my stead. 

Sez Bob, “…Ya ain’t missing nuthin’. 

It’s still too bleeping cold.”

Then there's the economy. The current administration is dealing with it ideologically like they did the start of the pandemic,...basically nothing is happening. So small businesses vaporize with them most American jobs. Those job losses are about to hit Great Depression levels. 

I wish that was alarmist. 

It's not. There are 'already' 26,000,000 millions jobless. 
We're on the verge of early 1930's numbers. Those folks screaming for reopening are nuts, but they're also desperate to get their jobs back. ...which increasingly are no longer there. 
Whoever is President in December after the election will be facing what FDR faced. 

If it's #45, well...

Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole


THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.


However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.


Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicenter of the pandemic.


As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”


It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – willfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.


The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.


If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?


It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender


What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.


In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.


Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fueled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.


It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.


Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.


Fertile ground


But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.


There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.


Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realization that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.


That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behavior has become normalized. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.


And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.


As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.