Editor’s Note: I was working on “What’s Next,” a jolly attempt to look at what is coming up the tracks to meet us as summer lurches to Fall in this strange year. Instead, Marlow cascaded into my world with this marvelous account of what he terms “Batshittery.” His part o the Coastal Empire seems a bit further along than we are here in the country. so welcome September with him, and on to my hilarious and necessary reference book “Rules for Radicals” tomorrow.

-Vic

Author’s Note: I am insanely exhausted by the past two weeks and by the last four years. Here is my final Take Five for 01 September 1 2020.

Despite the numerous things, both large and small, wrong with this country, one of the few things still right with it is that men can steer clear of the organized batshittery if they really want to. It’s not a goddamned luxury, so I’d take advantage of it while you can.

That way you won’t be disturbed when you’re deep asleep when the westward bound plane we Americans are currently riding hits the runway of some future airport not on our itinerary. The jolt will shake us instantly awake. We’ll look out the window to see some unknown high plains desert mountains off in the distance.

“What the fuck are we doing here?’ we’ll wonder. It won’t make any sense at all. There won’t be cellphone service, so calling our attorneys or brokers will be fruitless. The flight attendants will open the plane’s doors to air out the cabin only to have it fill with dark, venal and incurably violent smells. We’ll dig in the seatback in front us for any unused small booze bottles we bought earlier for $12 apiece to slowly sip, feeling old and foolish for not reading the fine print on the ticket about the airline’s divert policy. Our minds will flood with memories we witnessed long ago — not of things we had done but of things we had failed to do and opportunities missed, the wasted hours and moments forever lost because the web had eaten so much of our lives and we would never get them back.

We then will warmly recall how great this country was before the arrival of being digitally jacked in 24/7 and think how our old gods sure were in a good mood when they made this place.

In our guts, we’ll want nothing more than a bed with clean sheets, a bright room and something solid to call our own at least until we tire of it. We’ll be troubled by a lingering, awful suspicion that we’re irretrievably over the hump with the worst thing about it being that we don’t feel unfortunate at all, only weary, and sort of comfortably numb.

-Marlow

I wrote this piece after watching highlights, lowlights and outtakes of the two 2020 presidential conventions. I took some time re-reading Hunter S. Thompson and quaffing medicinals for my resulting irregular mental jerkiness and physical yips to cease long enough to type what follows.

These are times, when even being right feels wrong. It’s a strange world. A few lucky people seem to be getting ever richer, while others eat shit and die. In our newly opened, woke and free society where most of us have been declared guilty of some systemic or ecological felony, the only crime is getting caught in the act. In this new world of thieves (including appropriators), the only final sin is stupidity. So, if the world is insisting on being this crazy, we should demand to get paid for it or else we’re going to be charged, tried, if not locked up. Another $1200 would be a great start.

We’re besieged by an extreme level of political bullshit. So, a new term seems apropos — batshittery. The almighty internet defines it thusly: the questionable mental faculties of people or groups who for whatever reason, act as if they are completely insane. A derivative of the term “batshit crazy.”

This blizzard of mind-warping political agitprop out of Washington is constantly building up steam. Monday is the virus, Tuesday is the US Post Office, Friday is Police Shootings, Thursday is China trade-scares, etc, etc, etc. If we chose to believe all these brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the DC beltway, we would be dead before Sunday. It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of WW II Germany.

Four falls ago, I wrote a short piece about the onrushing national selection of one of the two clowns running for President. History seems to be rhyming and harmonizing with those long-ago vibes. The past four years of weirdness will be touted as the reason why for what follows during the next four.

Yippee.

Which drooling pile of rhino warts wins this year matters not. They just don’t make them like these two anymore. To be on the safe side, I recommend castrating them both.

Are these current nominees just American white trash dressed up in Chinese slave labor made designer suits who rose from the dregs of misfits, petty criminals, debtors, rent seekers, and social and moral bankrupts of every type and description? Regardless, after the early days learning their trade and moving up the ranks, they were turned loose on us to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history this setup was mutually advantageous — drifting and grifting became habit.

They are not American pioneers or settlers, just sleazy, rearguard, Johnny-come-lately, camp followers. Their world visions caused them to preach to the unfortunate, the abused, the boozing downtrodden in their limbos between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They lived off the surface of the land, like opportunistic 17-year locusts, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. Like their daily messages and talking points, theirs is a day-to-day existence of fierce craving boys who play with their audiences’ predominant sense of having been cheated.

Anyone who has driven our Western highways knows these two kept moving until one day they crested a scrub-oak covered California hill and looked down upon the Pacific Ocean — the end of the road. They then fully knew their destiny. Dead enders, both of them. We were totally screwed. Had we been there, we should have pushed them off the cliff.

The coming political dialogue in 2020 will be enriched by their spontaneous gibberish that will entertain the wrong people and their true believers and make anyone with an ounce of sense question their faith in our system.

It is crucial to remember the sage observation that some of us will never really live, but the crazy will never truly die. So, here’s to gentle rain on the roof and smoky aroma coffee, to plussed-up unemployment insurance and decent internet connections, to American bourbon and good-hearted landlords, to rock and roll music, warm bodies and laughter — lots and lots of it, whatever it’s about and whenever it happens to occur.

Cheers.

-Marlow

———

Apologies, but sometimes an unexplainable force, a chaos agent, or a mad genius with no regard for a sane person’s idea of normal arrives on the national scene that transfixes the entire American political spectrum. Not for a news cycle or ten but for years on end.

It’s been a wild ride these past four years.

Here are some of what I have observed are its attractions:

· Regardless of how bad, petty or nonsensical DC habitués’ previous batshittery was or is, this new entity elevates or enervates them and us so much that we endlessly watch the ensuing struggle due to the sheer force of whatever the hell this entity does or says.

· This individual makes performance choices AKA policy ruminations that no other politician, living or dead, would have ever made, whether they work or not.

· This person sports hair that could only be prosthetic, a wig or whatever but endlessly worthy of looking at and commenting upon it daily.

· This person commits 10,000% to a policy position that he has mastered by about 30%.

· None of the other DC actors around this person are even close to being on the same wavelength.

Using a highly scientific and completely foolproof process, I have tried whittling down a list of top-tier freakouts, creepouts, weird things, and flawless works of popcorn fun for better, worse, or whatever.

Before We Begin

These past few years have seen the most singularly unhinged performances since humanity first willed politics into trans tribal movements. He has single handedly changed and enriched the meaning of phoning it in.

It’s been like watching a 70+ year-old insist he can drop in on a skateboard park’s halfpipe. There’s beauty in that.

This year we found ourselves locked down aboard a nation-sized airplane hijacked by a crew of psychopaths led by Chairman and Great Helmsman Xi aka King Cyrus of the Virus. The batshittery around us thus increased by orders of magnitude. We were partly to blame.

So, here’s my list:

· When he commits to a policy that he doesn’t quite have a handle on, he does it so confidently that it makes you question the nature of your own reality. “Crazy Train departing from Platform 16A in five minutes.” blares the train station’s speaker. “Got a ticket and taking a ride,” we think as we rush forward to board.

· Raising points as he does from his White House Oval Office couch seat with cable news talking heads droning on his high def jam TVs are almost assuredly the best move he makes. What makes it truly fascinating in terms of his entire career is that it might be the only move he’s got that’s operating fully on his not-of-this-Earth wavelength. He has created a world where his zany energy feels like it naturally belongs. Sorta like teaching the DC beltway Bigfoots all the way to getting their law degrees and passing the bar exam.

· This all plays out like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon where his transcendence is like a bumbling Daffy Duck on crystal meth. His opponents see him as a lobotomized, straw stuffed scarecrow, while his supporters see him as a true stalwart and both achingly sweet and doomed by dangerous crazy. It’s a rare performance where his magnetism doesn’t come from oddball choices, because his zigzagging looks like normalcy in a DC world where the zany of the indigenous elites is sane.

· Like the Hell’s Angels, he never does anything halfway, so like anyone who deals in extremes he is bound to cause trouble, whether he means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes him an unmanageable angel from hell for his party and his staff and morbidly fascinating to the press and the general public.

· This unexplainable cosmic entity that crash-landed to Earth in the northern midwestern states of the USA in 2016 without explanation has endlessly delivered naught but technicolor madness and indescribably delectable lunacy to all it touches. It is as if this all-time crazy bit of batshittery and his family are, uh, let’s say “affected” by some orange glowing space orb. The accompanying Space Mountain courtesy ride has been an endless experience, an endurance test to see how long of an unfiltered, straight jacketed, nervous hospital stay one person can stomach at a time to see what it’s like to take an eighth of ‘shrooms and watch Leaving Las Vegas on an endless loop.

· The combination of this entity and the Democratic House leadership is such a dangerous mixture that I am quite sure it’s special-category classified by the United States intelligence community as a domestic terrorist threat. Thankfully, for the safety of the nation, they have rarely collaborated since the result would have been a bipartisan and inarguably perfect action fuck-you-a-palooza for the nation. So, we have been treated to a series of mini tornados of fireballs, policy machismo, air biscuits, and an essence inside a pair of wraparound aviator sunglasses that says “fuck you in particular” to any whiff of realism. In short: It has ripped.

· I feel that after these past four years we all absolutely and finally know what DC smells like, and that smell is what results when someone knocks over a plastic whiskey bottle while having sex inside a leaky pup tent during a shitrain storm. Once again, sorry if you’re mad that I have to explain this further.

· This nasty little horror-comedy has been a bloody gem and should have been marked with a WARNING label: CRANK HARD: High Voltage.

I’ve gotta say that it’s all been a “guilty pleasure” and a double-shot of “so bad it’s good.”

Election 2020’s plot defies both science and God, with two sworn, geezer-Brahmin enemies in some sort of Coen brothers’ Civil War musket movie that uses old man fart dust instead of gunpowder. We are well along an untrodden route to bananasville in a grainy, midnight B-movie that was never transferred past BETAMAX. 2020 will end with us electing a birthday-party clown to unknowingly audition to do a Chinese snuff film, and the result will be the kind of funny that we will on some lonely night feel guilty for finding it funny in the first place.

A still from 1991 Shakes the Clown black comedy movie–“the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies”

So, in the end, I recommend consideration of what Shakes the Clown is doing above.

——-

Despite all the preceding happy fire, I didn’t exercise bullet control above, so here are some saved rounds. The shell casings are yours to keep.

Saved round 1:

It is difficult for many American voters to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, not just some truthless monster with rat brains and a cockroach soul, could at some future point be sworn in as the president of the United States for the following four years. They don’t see the real problem that it is equiprobable an evil or truthful or truthless one might bring a gang in with him, a coarse network of lawyers, salesmen, charlatans, pimps and commie sell-outs who will loot the national treasury, warp our laws, mock our rules and norms, sell us out, and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially or unofficially, on some hapless tribe in one of the shit-Stans or a heathen religious zealout and his followers.

Productive political dialogue between America’s two opposing parties is mostly business and media generated illusionary horseshit. It simply doesn’t happen anymore. Yet the illusion is maintained that it is still part of the process. So, the lines are drawn and redrawn every half hour media cycle, while the fringelings at both ends of the spectrum are slipping on their brass knuckles, red ballcaps and black hoods and the elites are playing dialectic games at Starbucks and weeping like a bunch of upside-down turtles about the election.

Saved round 2:

Has our time come and gone? America’s unique political experimentation, dream and idea during this, its Main Era, haven’t fared too well recently. We are not representing well. Unthinkingly we’ve been running it hard like a car redlined at top speed, while sorting out all our destination options. They ranged all the way from Dumb and Dumber to Crazy Wicked and utterly wrong from the start.” To many it seems like the wheels are falling off. Lose one wheel, a modicum of skill will get you and your passengers safely to the side of the road. Insanely skilled freaks can make it on two. Losing three means you are in some serious shit. For sure we have lost one with the second wobbling wildly. Some think we’re close to losing three.

Saved round 3:

I have no affection for these two nominees — nothing serious or personal, mind you, but it seems that their televised virtual campaign events are genuinely cruel to them in their utter lack of real human politicking. They are forced to stand there in the midst of nobody on carefully crafted but empty stages where only digital ghosts watch them from afar as they endlessly ask these specters to shake their hands and vote for them. That they can show little or no pain at this absence makes it heart rending.

The plastic smiles on their faces are friendly, but most of our remote phantom citizenry ignore them, refusing to even acknowledge their outstretched hands, staring straight ahead as they hurry about their lives during this plague time. These real behind-the-scene scenes will never air. It’s just too painful.

I will do my best not to laugh at these campaign trail tragic mini-moments as the nominees increasingly lose all control of themselves when the final rut, er race, starts a week from now. Their eyes will glaze over, and their loins will engorge. With nostrils flared and cheeks flushed, they will bounce wildly about the country and swing states like huge cannonballs and volleys of bullets. They will become sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of those on PCP.

Enjoy the road show.

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