Unbelievable Friday

 "Remember and Rise," an event marking the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, had to be postponed after the Department of Homeland Security warned of "credible threats" from white nationalists and other Republicans.  

Matt Gaetz looked out at a mob of howling MAGAts in Dalton, Georgia, and decided to combine their love of guns with their newfound hatred of social media:  "The internet's hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us...Well you know what?  Silicon Valley can't cancel this movement, or this rally, or this congressman.  We have a Second Amendment in this country and I think we have an obligation to use it!"  The crackers began high-fiving and pulling up maps of California to look for Silicon Valley, which they think is a town like Simi Valley.  Confused, they settled for making more anonymous threats to Tulsa.  On social media, of course.  

Americans are flying again, and they're assaulting and verbally abusing flight attendants at an unprecedented rate.  Mostly they object to being told to wear a mask, but in one case a flight attendant lost teeth because she told a woman to fasten her seat belt preparatory to landing.  It may simply be that covid isolation has removed the thin veneer of civilized behavior and allowed people to revert to a state of nature.  A strike by flight attendants just when airlines and the overall economy are recovering might focus their attention but I doubt it.  Many people were never socialized in the first place, like the rioters of...

January 6, which will not be investigated by an independent commission because only 54 senators wanted it and democracy doesn't apply there, either.  Anybody got a concordance?  Please see if the word "filibuster" occurs in the Bible.  Maybe it will when the God Bless the USA Bible goes on sale in September to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11.  Clearly meant for the "America is a Christian nation" crowd, a better name would be The Cognitive Dissonance Bible.  In one volume it will contain the King James translation of 1611, considered the central masterpiece of seventeenth century English prose; a key document of the Enlightenment written by (at most) Deists and crippled by compromise; the Pledge of Allegiance by nineteenth century socialist Francis Bellamy; and the deeply bathetic lyrics of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA."  A bargain at $49.99.

As Charlie Pierce reminds us, Newt Gingrich at the height of his delusional grandiosity once described himself as the "definer of civilization's rules," so it's past time he and "high crimes and misdemeanors" Trump partnered up on a new "Contract With America."  It sounds better than "Harmonic Convergence of Pure Evil," doesn't it?   "The Herodotus of West Georgia College" wants to start off by forcing the states to teach history the way I learned it -- no slave revolts, very few Injuns, onward to the sunlit uplands of the American Century.  No 1619 Project much less Howard Zinn or Henry Louis Gates, and stony denial of anything that challenges the white-men-triumphant narrative.  And let's bring back those Dr. Seuss books cancelled by Biden!  Something for Trump to read.  

Neuter Gingrich is a big fan of Texas educationists but the hard work is getting done in North Carolina, where right-thinkin' parents want to burn, uh, ban One of a Kind, Like Me because its story of a boy who wants to dress as a princess is Against the Will of You-Know-Who.  When the new Contract is signed, such blasphemy won't even be published and if it is, well, see Matt Gaetz on the Lord's Second Amendment.  Dark times ahead.