Who’s responsible for Donald Trump’s arrested development? His mother?
Roy Cohn?
I mean, most of the 8th grade boys I taught would be ashamed to unironically depict themselves as a superhero a la the abomination below:
Especially, if in reality, they looked like this.
Now, Pete Hegseth is getting in on the Soviet era propaganda poster craze.
He posted this the other day.
They’re little boys, these two. Tweens, these two, absolutely incapable of self-deprecation.
There, I’ve fixed it.
Rene Magritte: Not to Be Reproduced
I’ve resigned myself to the reality that I can’t always distinguish an AI-altered video from what might be an actual recording of people or animals or vehicles moving in real time in three dimensional space. Hence, I’m not confident of the validity of some of what I see online. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a reel on X where Donald Trump was allegedly cheating at golf, whiffing a drive, surreptitiously picking up the ball and tee, as if the ball were arcing over the middle of the fairway. Other X viewers asserted that what I had seen was AI fabricated and substituted it with what they claimed to be the unaltered original where Trump legitimately smacks the ball and picks up the tee. Then a couple of days ago, there he is at the FIFA Club World Cup keeping for himself a gold medal designated for one of the players, pocketing the medal as he had the golf ball.
I have no idea which videos are real.
A young friend of mine, a musician who this fall will be touring the country from coast to coast with a band I’ve never heard of, told me this afternoon that there’s an AI “band” being promoted by Spotify that cranks out catchy pop tunes that are racking up big time numbers.
Hey, AI, conjure me some light pop grooves. like the Monkees meet BTS.
Is it a real band or is it AI? Did she filter that photo? This has gotta be a parody account?
All anyone seems to care about on this broiling planet is attention and megabucks, amassing followers, becoming an influencer, wielding power, casting illusions.
Meanwhile, the government of the United States of America, an erstwhile beacon of hope, has slapped together a concentration camp in Florida and sadistically christened it “Alligator Alcatraz.” [1] Although supposedly a temporary hell for violent, criminal immigrants before they’re shipped off to God-knows-where, some parties claim that the incompetent Trump regime has rounded up any number of law abiding house framers and farm workers and dumped them there, which I bet is true. Rather than tapping experts to run the government, Trump has selected an array of television personalities, mostly Fox News shills, who look good on TV but, in the case of the head of FEMA, wasn’t aware there was something called a hurricane season. Holograms as opposed to seasoned professionals are running the country.
The citizenry’s response –– and I include myself in this censure –– seems more or less “meh.”
I’m powerless, busy, can’t really influence domestic or geo-political events, an attitude that brings to mind Richard Wilbur’s sardonic elegy for Delmore Schwartz, “To An American Poet Just Dead:
In the Boston Sunday Herald, just three lines
Of no point type for you who used to sing
The praises of imaginary wines,
And died, I am told, of the real thing.
*
Also gone, but a lot less forgotten
Are an eminent cut-rate druggist, a lover of Giving,
A lender, and various brokers: gone from this rotten
Taxable world to a higher standard of living.
*
And the soupy summer is settling, full of yarns
Of Sunday fathers loitering late in bed,
And the sshhh of sprays on all the little lawns.
*
Will the sprays weep wide for you your chaplet tears?
For you will the deep-freeze units melt and mourn?
For you will Studebakers shred their gears
And sound from each garage a muted horn?
*
They won’t. In summer sunk and stupefied
The suburbs deepen in their sleep of death.
And though they sleep sounder since you died
It’s just as well that now you save your breath.
Well, at least I know that Wilbur’s poem was written on a typewriter or in longhand. Of that I can be assured. It’s not ersatz.
Delmore Schwartz
[1] Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman visited the camp and reports that detainees are kept in cages, 32 per cage, served substandard food, and get their drinking water from, as she puts it, “the unit” where they defecate.
In 1983, before we had children, Judy Birdsong and I spent two months galivanting around Europe. We prebooked only three hotels – one in London, one in Paris, and one in Athens. In between these destinations, we idly roamed. We climbed white cliffs in Dover, spent a week in Arles as a base camp for excursions to Nice and Cannes, rode a sea-tossed vomit-splashed boat to Mykonos, etc.
On the trip back to Hamburg, where we departed for home, we hung out in Munich for a couple of days and made a day trip to Dachau where we toured the infamous concentration camp. It was an appropriately gray day with leaden clouds misting rain. On the train, a recording disconcertingly announced, “Next stop, concentration camp.”
I remember that the outdoor spaces of the barbed-wire enclosure featured gravel that crunched beneath our shoes. We walked through the sleeping quarters with their raw claustrophobic wooden bunks. I also remember an American soldier yanking his four year old son by the arm and swatting him on his butt for some misdeed.
I thought to myself, “Man, I can’t believe he did that here in all places – a concentration camp.”
Of course, back then I never dreamed that my native country forty years later would be constructing concentration camps to imprison minorities.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
WB Yeats “Nineteen-Hundred-and-Nineteen”
Not only are we building concentration camps, but the President and his lackies are touting them, paying official visits, sadistically branding them. This one’s called Alligator Alcatraz.
The Republican Party of Florida is obscenely selling Alligator Alcatraz merch.
No doubt the Evangelicals are ecstatic, babbling in tongues praises to the Almighty.
Again, Yeats:
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked—and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
You Do Hoodoo 