SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: BEEN AWAY, WHAT'D I MISS? EDITION.

You should be satisfied, but it ain't quite right .

A month between alicubi editions? So sorry! Been a busy, busy time, with surgery etc.

Since I know you like it fresh, I won’t reach back too many days for Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies. Here’s a quickie on the White House UFC Cage Match, our latest frontier in national self-embarrassment -- I mean of course there’s a Tubby grift angle as well, but that goes without saying; what really lifts the gorge is its willful grotesquerie. I talk a little here about exactly why it’s specifically this kind of mortifying spectacle and not, say, Donald Trump’s Night of A Thousand Tits or The Most Dangerous Game: See It Live! I will add, and I may elaborate on this someday, that there’s a whole social history to be written on the “populist” impulse to dirty up our federal government, going back perhaps to Andrew Jackson and certainly including the tendency of audiences to cheer in 1996 when they saw the part of the trailer for Independence Day where the White House was blown up. Well, maybe someday we’ll have enough real self-government that this kind of fantasy is less attractive.

And I might as well throw in this one about the ever-receding imminence of the end of the Iran War; the essay is almost a week old yet we may say it’s an evergreen because this shtick where Trump and his goons say they have the war won and the papers rush to cry PEACE IS AT HAND has been going on practically since the beginning and is still happening, on repeat. (Looking right this very minute at USA Today: “Hegseth says US ‘postured and prepared’ for reengagement with Iran.” Postured is right!) For those of us who long ago internalized that Trump is devoted to lies and in fact will never willingly tell the truth and may not be capable of it even if it would help him, this is no surprise. But the Prestige Press must pretend because it fills pages and preserves access -- while also destroying the public’s trust in them, but clearly they don’t see that as part of their remit.  

I imagine this bothers some of the morally-encumbered members of the Fourth Estate, which may be why there has been some coverage of the hilarious exodus of allegedly scheduled musical acts from that UFC thing. It’s a rare case in which you can see in real time how poisonous this regime is to anyone who would actually have to face the public about cooperating with it afterward. That’s part of why it drives conservatives berserk -- check out “Not A Single Modern Celeb Could Be Bothered To Perform For America 250” at wingnut ragesite The Federalist:

This sharp of a patriotic split between the American people, who by all accounts are excited to go all out on this extra special 4th of July, and the people who produce this country’s pop culture cannot stand. There has to be a reckoning between the American people who cry out for patriotic content and a media-entertainment complex that does everything in its power to demonize the United States. It can’t go on like this. Either patriots take back the culture, or the current pop culture regime will destroy the social fabric of the country. There are no other options.

They run all three branches of the whole damn federal government, yet they’re enraged that people who make art won’t slaver over them like Tubby’s Cabinet in one of those televised grovelfests. For the right, culture war is always a war ON culture.