In the midst of burned-out ruin a seedling…


As Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story. I’ve been obsessing about the Death of America, boring everybody, especially my wife, to tears. I’m right about how bad it is, but that doesn’t matter, does it? “Don’t be a Debbie Downer” is the real American Way. I get it. Well, I’ve got it now. A young lady I got to watch grow from teenage angst to mature married beauty sent me photographs of the costume she wore at her office Christmas party this year. She gave me credit for introducing her to Veronica Lake.


Okay. I’m pleased and proud. And hopeful, even if only for a moment. Imagination, glamor, wit, and humor never go out of style. They might even save us in the end.

Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

My World and Welcome to It

Image
     T his post was last updated at 3:15 PM, Wednesday, April 2.  Latest post is “Things that want Me to Write about Them. ” NEW: Volume II of “ The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon ” has been added in to the original 2020 post. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I made my own pilgrimage there once in my youth to ...
Read more

The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon

Image
UPDATED MARCH 15, 2025, with the addition of Volume II below. Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama  figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on. Here’s another relevant book . I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t rea...
Read more

One Book of the Apunkrypha

Image
Most people don’t know that when I wrote  The Boomer Bible , I wrote more books than I included in the final version. This is one of them. I dug it out because for some reason I’m starting to get Facebook notifications of provocative posts from objectivists (i.e., Randians) on my Friends(?) list, which is a little surprising to me. I don’t remember adding them as friends, but when I look at their Friends lists I see all kinds of names I don’t expect to see there, including people like Breitbart’s John Nolte and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. It’s okay by me that the Randians have friends in common with me, and I feel bad about  banning them just because I think Rand is only valuable as a juvenile rite of passage in developing an individuated consciousness. Which is a kind way of saying that I believe she’s a writer good minds should outgrow in their early twenties at the latest. I’m sure she meant well, but her understandable underdog assertiveness has become an unpleasant ...
Read more

The Constitutional Crisis that Isn’t

Image
The spelling authority relied on here is from the U.S. Gazetteer in Shuteye  Nation ,  which is also the source, by omission, that Rode Island doesn’t even exist. Not a Constitutional Crisis? What is it then? A judicial coup attempt launched by 6 shopped judges in 3 states, plus DC. Actually, only two states, since ‘Rode Island’ is just a Brahmin trick to give ‘Machusetts’ four senators. Of the judges, three are wymyn, three are myn, however these are defined anymore, three have Harvard law degrees, two have law degrees from anti-Christian formerly Catholic universities (one law degree doesn’t even count because it’s from Uhio), and all are left-wing Democrats.  Two kinds of proof are offered here. One is derived from an ancient ritual practice called Logic, presently either unknown or odious to post-modern ‘Progressives,’ who need nothing more than the right drug regimen to arrive at the ephemera they describe as Truth and Justice. The other proof will be visual, wh...
Read more

The Secret Life of a Clouded Brain

Image
  Click on the pic. It leads to a post describing a Tom Hanks skit on SNL.  That’s  what this post is about. More precisely, it’s about who this very  fortunate man really is under the greasepaint. He’s not James Stewart. Have you clicked and read the story about Hanks pissing off half a country that’s always wanted to love him? The caption might be a little overstated, true as it is, but it’s only one of three things this post is about. Tom Hanks, sure. But also the fact that I’m thanking him at the moment for making me do some long overdue reclamation work on a piece that has been effectively lost for a couple years now. I’ll get to the third thing later. The stupid Hanks performance reminded me that I had written a satirical piece about him that got effectively lost when one of my biggest blogs suddenly lost all its formatting in some administrative change by its provider, who were still billing me but could not be reached for troubleshooting services. They’d been...
Read more

A Reclamation Project Begun

Image
As you work your way through the links here, don’t be shy. Get ‘Click Happy.’ Even on pics. FIGHTING BACK ONE FILE AT A TIME … How bad has it gotten? I uploaded this video from the old Instapunk at YouTube an hour ago. It has already been removed for violating YT Community Standards.  There’s a pdf version, just published, of the post from Instapunk.com the video above was created for. Nobody censored it 15 years ago. Back then, it was unquestioningly covered as freedom of expression. Here’s my pdf file of ‘ The Goosestep Enigma ’.  This was by no means the most controversial post or graphic included in Instapunk’s 2,000+++ posts over the years. Now I’m going back in time to make pdf versions of the key parts of that website, meaning the most comical, controversial, reflective, insightful, and graphically provocative. But why reinvent the wheel. It’s all still there, isn’t it? The sad fact is that the truly huge resource called Instapunk.com is facing a ticking clock. The orig...
Read more