SUNDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: TWO DAYS LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT EDITION.

Albini RIP.

UGGGH guys, I know, I’ve blown another deadline but you have to understand I was just on a (far too brief!) vacation back in the homeland, and it was glorious – saw friends and familiar faces and places, and absorbed the life-giving 220V jolt of big city living -- but my first week back here was so nerve-shattering I couldn’t manage a Friday post or even a Saturday one. So Friday-‘Round-the-Horn is two days late. Please forgive me. 

Anyway my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, despite the hectic pace of national news, are still worth a look! First, we have my essay on Peter Baker laying the tattered credibility of the New York Times over a blood-puddle and helping Peggy Noonan to step over it – as fitting an image of the complete collapse of the prestige press as any I can think of: a NYT made man and a venerable WSJ received-opinion diffuser collaborating to tsk-tsk-tsk college kids for having the nerve to denounce senseless mass slaughter of Palestinians by an American client state. I'm not sure what Pete ‘n’ Peggy are thinking -- maybe they fantasize themselves representatives of U.S. interests (or U.S.-based business interests, anyway) and may, indeed must, justify any sins committed on those interests' behalf, like Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg’s Lincoln, when he thunders, “I am the President of the United States, clothed in immense power!” – though their version, whatever their imaginings, is prissy and passive-aggressive, and supports a thuggish foreign belligerent rather than emancipation and American liberty. Well, as long as they feel they've done their bit. 

And speaking of received opinion, here’s the second freebie, in which our Sunday morning political TV talk show tackles (or rather dutifully if ineffectually gums) the subject of pathetic Veep-spot scrambler Kristi Noem of South Dakota and her puppy-murder. Noem, like all these fuckers, is so full of shit I doubt she even had a puppy, but whatever the backstory I do believe she meant her lurid tale to pique the interest of King Shit with its pseudo-countrified cruelty. (Her last-minute “You city slickers don’t know what it’s like on the farm!” gambit suggests she hoped newspaper dummies would buy that real rustics shoot coon hounds and barn cats like they was a-swattin’ flies. Sadly, for her, no one thinks that.)  I still believe Tubby will go for a black man who can call Kamala Harris a bitch and a ho and set a few million Cletuses howling with delight. But who knows? Maybe he'll just nominate one of his kids, or a horse. It's not like his rubes give a shit.