Skippy Dies

 People will believe anything, if it's what they want to hear.

--Paul Murray, The Mark and the Void

I intended to write something earlier than now about a novel I had just recently finished reading, but then all of this election bullshit found its way into my head and interrupted me for a moment. 

Although the quote above is from Paul Murray's novel The Mark and the Void, what I wanted to talk about was Skippy Dies.

I approached Skippy Dies in much the same way I had approached Murray's novel The Bee Sting, which is to say with a certain unreasonable prejudice. Well, what prejudice is reasonable? one might ask. In short, I did not like the title (which however--spoiler alert--turned out to be perfect). Nor did I feel interested in the brief description of the story found on the internet--the various goings-on at an Irish Catholic school for boys. It just didn't seem to be something that would touch me. 

Nonetheless, having come away from The Bee Sting astounded at this writers narrative and stylistic excellence, I decided to give Skippy Dies a shot. And boy am I glad I did. 

Like The Bee Sting, Skippy Dies is quite long, some 600 plus pages. But it is the kind of long that you don't want to end. You find yourself living there, in that school, and among those boys. More than that, you find yourself living back in your own adolescence, among all the very similar boys you knew, as well as the you that you knew. How Murray has managed to retain such an intimate acquaintance with what it is to be that age, I do not know. He has remembered here all of the things that most of us forget, and perhaps intentionally so. He remembers the careless disregard on the surface, the facade, and the naive, unreasoning, invulnerable hopes that lie beneath, striving toward the moment they are finally broken by that compromised, corrupted world of despair we call adulthood.

Skippy Dies is both laugh out loud funny and painfully bitter--which might be described as Murray's signature style. Forewarned is forearmed. This book will both fill your heart and break it.

No Country for Old Men

 No Country for Old Men. That's the headline in America today. And it's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore. 

One wonders what the Democrats will do now to further undercut their chances at winning the election. Fight over which new candidate they really want? Continue to distract the press from the base imbecile being run by the other party?

Look, I personally like Harris, but to be honest I don't believe she can attract independent and swing voters. She is way too liberal. I'm serious, folks. No joke. I mean, come on man 😅

Well, we still have prayer. And we better get on our knees straightaway.

The Oath

 I woke this morning to a reply to a comment I had made on a man's Facebook post. In the original post he wrote that no one had shown that the 2020 election was not stolen from Trump. I helpfully replied that 60 courts, overseen by judges from both parties, had rejected the Trump administration's claims of election fraud, and I attached a couple of factual informative links for him to peruse. To this the man immediately responded that this was a lie. There were not 60 courts. There were not any courts. This had merely been repeated so often that people took it to be true 😅

So that is typical of the tenor of political discourse nowadays. Believe what you like, reject what you don't like. Simple as that. It is not an isolated sort of response. It is common. 

And it appears to me, folks, that it does not matter which candidate the Democratic party runs, for if he or she wins the election, the MAGA response will be simply to say that No they didn't. And it will be uglier then than January 6th. People think that we can beat MAGA simply by winning an election. We can't. It will only radicalize them further. It will only be the latest call to insurrection. Because MAGA is not fueled by policy. It is not fueled by patriotism or belief in democracy. It is fueled by plain hatred--of black people, of brown people, of Mexican people, of liberal people, of homosexual people, of trans people, of immigrants (excepting those from Norway). It is not a political response and has nothing to do with government, per se. It is a cultural response, a paranoid and fearful revulsion at the changing character of America. It is an all-consuming, non-negotiable oath to intolerance. "Christian" nationalism? Give me a break. It is heresy most foul.

Deplorable

 Well I'll be damned if I've ever seen a party try so hard to lose a presidential election. Week after week the Democratic elites dither around about who they might want their candidate to be, rejecting the vote of the populace that has already approved Joe Biden. It is sad and, well, dare I say it...deplorable. I swear to God the whole thing is going to turn me into a conspiracy theorist. Is some kind of shady dark money behind a plot to throw the election? Anyway, if the Dems do lose, they will richly deserve it, for they have well and truly mobilized against themselves.

The Great Malaise

 What strikes me most today about the apparent assassination attempt on former President Trump is not so much the event itself but the nature of so many of the responses on social media, infused as they are with such soul numbing moral vacuity, such undisguised, unapologetic, hatred. I wish I could add the word inhuman, but I cannot, because it is all as human as hell. And it is not bound to one side or the other. It is universal. A great and stunning egalitarian commitment to hatred ignorance, proud negligence-- thousands upon thousands who in their sickly souls pull the trigger just as easily as did the assassin. And it strikes me, after all, that this upcoming election does not really matter. The infection is rampant in America and lives now of its own accord, to kill, steal and destroy. Nothing happens from this point forward that does not merely feed the disease and enlarge its lethality. A mentally ill person acted out. A morally ill society has responded.

The Late Great National Freak Out

 Naturally, I have been watching the ongoing self-inflicted insanity in the Democratic party and the liberal press as they go about undoing President Biden's election campaign. And what a sorry sight it is. Biden has been the most active, most productive president in the last 50 years, in my estimation, and this is the thanks he gets: calls from his own party members encouraging him to step down, to bend over, rollover, wimp out, or whatever it is they are doing and step aside for a different candidate. Like who? Kamala Harris, who is more generally disliked than Biden himself? Or maybe one of these senators calling for Biden to step down thinks that he himself is up to the job. That's a laugh. This is the least popular senate in the history of the country, with an approval rating nearly as low as that of the farce that we call the Supreme Court. And why are they so certain that Biden will lose? Polls, they say, polls. But hold on, didn't the polls say that Biden would lose in 2020? In fact, didn't they say that Clinton would win in 2016? And how about that red wave they predicted in 2022? It's just about like believing the sky is going to fall because Chicken Little said so, ain't it? He is 82 years old, they say. He will be 86 by the end of a second term they fret, employing their marvelous powers of mathematical figuring. What happens if he can't last that long? What happens then? Well, what would happen would be that his very able vice president would take over the job and continue the successful agenda that is already in place. Isn't that what a vice president is for? Ah, but on they go, day after day turning into week after week. More like weak, I say. Weak-kneed, weak-minded, weak-willed. A bunch of pussies. Fearing what? Trump? I cannot believe, and will not believe that Americans will vote for a convicted felon, 34 times convicted, a fraud, a man found liable for sexual assault, and a man who is very obviously far more addled than Joe Biden will ever be. Electric airplanes that cannot fly because the sun is not out? Electric boats, sharks, the late great Hannibal Lecter? Come on now, folks. I know that Americans are not this stupid. Or God knows I hope they're not.