Silly Saturdays — Of Curses and Cagliostro
They don’t let me out much anymore. I feel like Uncle Fred.
Back on the first of April I rechristened the next 30 days April Fools Month. Turns out I was right to do that, as the Democrat downward spiral into an unhinged opposite of what it once prided itself for became more laughable by the day. Now we are on the 30th day of what I am hopefully about to bury as “May Madness,” a cringe-inducing period of violent Dem fantasies and true-life violence they deplore without seeming able to connect their own rhetoric with mass shootings and assassination attempts. They’re actually proud of themselves.
A lot like their Republican counterpart, the RINOs, whose only sign of backbone in many years has been their willingness to defy Trump and conspire openly against the legislative priorities he was elected to implement. And, like the Dems, they're proud of themselves. It’s not a small group. Let me count the stiff-necked feeders at the Wall St/Pharma/Amnesty/Pork/Antisemite trough who have spent the month sniveling their complaints about Trump to Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week with George Stupidopoulos, 60 Minutes, PBS, CNN, CNBC, MsNOW, and Fox & Friends: John Thune, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, Karl Rove, the Texican Bushes, Mitt Romney, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and (lest we forget) Mike Pence. The madness? They believe that the sacred cow called the Silent Majority (dead and digested since Agnew took a plea) is quietly yearning for a restoration of the Grand Old Party I once brilliantly summed up this way in my Y2000 Shuteye Nation Glossary:
Well, the Repubs are in there somewhere. Dog’s sleeping on my specs, so you dig it out.
You’ll have to excuse me. Days since I took anything seriously in the news. Never seen so much slop gooshing around in the mass media. What did Rosie and Bruce and DeNiro and the Hulk say today in their years long contest to prove who’s the biggest fuckwit in the celebrity world? Is there any actual conservative at Breitbart who isn’t on a season-long vacation in Hilton Head?
What I do is scan the auto-combusting headlines of the various ‘right-leaning’ pop-up infested e-rags and have boosted fundraising for the goofy factor by a notch or two. Which is a challenge, believe you me. It makes posting here more of a challenge. In a world where nobody is reading anymore, writing something longer than three paragraphs seems like an act of existential masochism. But duty is a hard mistress to keep locked in the closet. She has a way of wriggling out of her (their?) handcuffs and demanding a post.
So I thought I’d show you how I spent my morning bouncing almost at random from one source of irrelevant trivia to another and explaining how one leads to another as if by coincidence.
First up, the reliable news smorgasbord called the Gateway Pundit had the only intriguing post I found over my first cup of coffee.
Senator John Cornyn (RINO-TX) drove the internet crazy on Friday after posting a very cryptic tweet a few days following his massive loss to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas GOP Senate runoff election.
As The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson reported, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton smoked Cornyn in a landslide victory on Tuesday. The race was called within one hour of the polls closing.
Out of nowhere, Cornyn decided to tweet the famous fable of the scorpion and the frog. As TGP readers know, the frog decides to carry the scorpion across the river after the eight-legged arthropod promises not to sting it.
But the scorpion suddenly betrays the frog, stinging it in the middle of the river, and both die. When the dying frog asked the scorpion why it stung, the arthropod replied: “I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.”
Social media users immediately began speculating about what Cornyn could have meant by this fable. Many thought he was calling Trump the scorpion and himself the frog.
Others theorized that Cornyn was calling himself the scorpion.
The rest of it was other ‘X’-wits dumping on Cornyn. Since most were the same joke without a real punchline, I’ll let you find them on your own here.
I thought of my own exit line, a paraphrase of a much more seasoned (i.e,, dead) wit than I:
Something about the Trump Curse, which I’ve discussed before. But we don’t have time to belabor that old warhorse here. I tried to look in on Bannon’s War Room, but that’s a small room with a different ear in it every day. This morning it was Proboscic inveighing about how letting up on deportations in Minneapolis and points east was one more sign of the ‘Republic Dying in Darkness,’ which I already know enough about. So I switched over to ROKU’s free TV offerings of the day, which snagged me with a barely budgeted horror movie called Ghost Note, described by the blurb as the story of a legendary blues singer who sold his soul to the devil and came back to life as a serial killer. Couldn’t pass that up. Somebody had the nerve to turn a true musical legend into a slasher flick villain. Here’s the trailer.
It was better than I was expecting. Better than the War Room anyway. They changed the name, the timeframe, and completely passed up the opportunity to play some honest-to-God black blues music from the past. They used the ghost’s indestructible guitar and unbreakable last record as a curse that would keep him an immortal killer for eternity. But they didn’t kill off the romantic leads, and there were a lot excellent vintage MOPAR muscle cars to look at (for some unexplained reason).
The missing music was correctable though. After the movie I found the greatest hits of Robert Johnson. Be my guest…
I did look him up at Wiki. The oddly compelling part of the urban legend that he sold his soul to the devil was the fact that his musical career was undistinguished until the last seven months of his life, when he wrote and recorded some of the all time great and seminal works of blues music in 1935/6. All that is known of his death is a certificate with no cause or other explanatory circumstances. We don’t know for sure that the devil didn’t come to collect the soul Johnson told everyone he’d sold. We don’t know if he ever came to regard his deal with the devil as a curse. Given the sadness of his music, it’s hard to believe he didn’t come to regard it that way.
But that’s how my morning came to be about curses, real and imagined. Almost all that was left was finding the right title for this post. I was determined not to put Trump’s name in the headline. I wrote “…Of Curses and—“ and stopped. And what? For no reason I can give you, what popped randomly into my head was ‘Cagliostro.’ I typed it and left it as a placeholder, then refreshed the very faint memory that must have prompted my choice. Here’s what I found:
Gotcha. That’ll please the TDS’ers.
I said ‘almost all that was left’ before the Cagliostro gag. What’s interesting to me is that the ghost of Robert Johnson came to me by an indirect route just a few days ago. I was having trouble remembering Ry Cooder’s first name. Loved his slide guitar with a passion back in the day. Consulted YouTube and the hottest single they had was his version of Johnson’s ‘Crossroads.’ Could be that’s the reason I wound up biting on the Ghost Note movie, which certainly seems to have belonged in my day.
This title also seems weirdly relevant. Hard not to see that the driftwood RINOs haven’t also reached a crossroads, one where they must decide between continued egotistical posturing and participating again in the real life of the nation.
What’s stopping them? The all too real phenomenon they keep finding out about the hard way…
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