NORMAL AND NOT: It's "not normal," the governor said!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025

That's only one part of the deal: There it sits, even as we sit here typing.

We refer to the headline which sits atop Ezra Klein's (lengthy) column for the New York Times. This is the headline as it exists online:

Stop Acting Like This Is Normal

Stop acting like this is normal! Within the body of his lengthy essay, Klein is offering that advice to Democratic members of Congress. 

More specifically, he's trying to decide what Democrats should do as the latest government shutdown approaches. He says he isn't sure what the Dem should do—but along the way, he says this:

Democrats cannot pretend this is a normal Republican administration. They cannot ignore masked agents in the streets, armed troops in the cities, billions of dollars of money going into the Trump family’s pockets, an administration that spins off several scandals in a week that would have consumed other presidencies for years. If Democrats cannot make an issue out of all that, then they are screwed and so are we.

And we might be...

Democrats shouldn't pretend that this is a normal administration. If Democrats can't establish that point, then we're all screwed, he says.

He also says that we might already be screwed. Continuing directly, he offers this

And we might be. Even if Democrats could agree on a message, do they have the messengers? Have Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer distinguished themselves as able to win an argument? Are they going to hold the line as national parks close down, as federal employees are furloughed, if checks stop going out the door, if flights are delayed because air traffic controllers aren’t getting paid? I don’t know that they will. I am quite certain that this moment deserves real opposition—that Democrats, morally speaking, should not fund a government that Trump is turning into a tool of personal enrichment and power. But I am not certain that Democrats can win a shutdown—I am not certain that they have the leaders that they need. It is absolutely the case that Democrats could lose a shutdown, but whatever they’re doing right now, it’s not called winning.

In Klein's view, Democrats could lose a showdown over the impending government shutdown—but whatever Dems are doing now, "it's not called winning." They may not have sufficiently talented leaders, he says.

We agree with all that! As we noted all last week, we suspect that the current undeclared American civil war has perhaps already been lost by the various ineffective forces of our own Blue America.

The Achaeans are coming over the walls again in this, the latest iteration of the never-ending human "night assault." To our eye, we Blues don't seem to have the slightest idea how to react to this onslaught.

We Blues don't seem to know what to do about this "night assault." And as we've long noted at this site, it's been this way for at least the past thirty-plus years, dating back to the invention of the Whitewater pseudo-scandal in bungled reporting on the front page of that same New York Times.

First that pseudo-scandal, then the subsequent years long war against Candidate Gore! We Blues just sat there and twiddled our thumbs as the current era got its start in those early (and deadly) assaults.

All in all, we Blues have never been able to discern a key fact—like the townsfolk of Camus' Oran, we just aren't especially sharp. At any rate, there was Ezra Klein's new column, and we agree with that headline:

We agree! A whole lot of entities in Blue America need to stop pretending that the devolving conduct of this administration is some version of normal.

In particular, the conduct of the sitting president has increasingly been "not normal!" We derive that quotation from a recent remark which has been widely reported.  

The statement was made by Governor Pritzker (D-Illinois). Here's the way the mild-mannered (and cash-strapped) PBS reported what the governor said, via the Associated Press:

Trump says ‘we’re not going to war’ with Chicago after threatening city on social media

President Donald Trump on Saturday amplified his promises to send National Guard troops and immigration agents to Chicago by posting a parody image from “Apocalypse Now” featuring a ball of flames as helicopters zoom over the nation’s third-largest city.

“’I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The president offered no details beyond the label “Chipocalypse Now,” a play on the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s dystopian 1979 film set in the Vietnam war, in which a character says: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

[...]

The president “is threatening to go to war with an American city,” Pritzker wrote on X over an image of Trump’s post. “This is not a joke. This is not normal.”

Let's focus on the governor's key remark, which we post below. It echoes the Ezra Klien headline:

This is not normal

"This is not normal," the governor said. It's hard to dispute that assessment.

The crackpot post by the sitting president had a clear crackpot feel. “’I love the smell of deportations in the morning?" So the bizarre sitting president said, as he said that his nation's third-largest city was about to encounter his nation's Department of WAR.

In truth, extremely strange posts by this rather strange man have become as Americana as apple pie, in the sense of being thoroughly normal. We recall, for example, the recent post in which he weirdly showed President Obama being frog-marched away in chains. 

"Truths" like that have become the norm. Over here in Blue America, our greatest news orgs have tended to avert their gaze from this ongoing strange behavior.  You can learn about it at Mediaite, but not in the New York Times.

Nothing to look at, those orgs have implicitly said. With that in mnd, there is one thing which can be said:

With increasingly frequency, the president's behavior does seem to be "not normal." In his most recent post, he said he loved the smell of deportations—of folks being led off in chains as the city of Chicago gets ready to learn about WAR.

Something seems to be possibly wrong with this very powerful man. We've advised you to pity the child, but with respect to his frequent behavior, it doesn't seem to be normal at all.

Nor is it only the president. The sitting vice president keeps pimping out social media posts in which he identifies the things he "doesn't give a shit" about. That too is decidedly "not normal." But sometimes in the course of human affairs, the "not normal" has wracked up big wins.

The Mongols, the Huns, the Goths—the Achaeans? All have staged famously successful "night assaults." Meanwhile, how about the warlike but little remembered Scythians? The leading authority on their conquests gives us this capsule on them:

Scythians

The Scythians or Scyths, also known as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranic equestrian nomadic people who migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, where they remained until the 3rd century BC.

Skilled in mounted warfare, the Scythians displaced the Agathyrsi and the Cimmerians as the dominant power on the western Eurasian Steppe in the 8th century BC. In the 7th century BC, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus Mountains and often raided West Asia along with the Cimmerians.

In the 6th century BC, they were expelled from West Asia by the Medes, and retreated back into the Pontic Steppe, and were later conquered by the Sarmatians in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC. By the 3rd century AD, last remnants of the Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths, and by the early Middle Ages, the Scythians were assimilated and absorbed by the various successive populations who had moved into the Pontic Steppe...

The Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths. At present, in roughly the same location, the Ukrainians are engaged in the long, slow process of being overwhelmed by the Russians as the sitting president delusionally whispers to poor Macron that his darling Vladimir wants to make a peace deal—indeed, wants to make a peace deal for him!

This administration's conduct is "not normal—or is its conduct perhaps as normal as the way we humans sleep and breathe? "Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world," sacred Camus writes in The Plague, "yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."

As we start the week, we'll start by saying this:

We'd score Governor Pritzker's widely-reported statement as accurate. Sadly, we'd also say that many of his own assertions and behaviors will seem "not normal" to many voters—and we're  forced to say that such voters aren't exactly "wrong."

The "not normal" is general over the nation a this point in time. A "night assault" is part of the package—and we'd say that we Blues seem to be losing at present.

The president's conduct is "not normal"—but the same can be said of much of the conduct emerging from us Blues. In the eternally human manner, we Blues tend to have a very hard time seeing this fairly obvious fact about ourselves.

Our leading Blue American orgs won't report or discuss the way the president's troops are behaving on the Fox News Channel. Our orgs refuse to discuss the possibility that issues of "mental health" may be involved in this administration's various "not normal" behaviors.

By our assessment, the administration's behavior really is "not normal"—except in the way that such conduct has been a regular feature of human life here on Earth.  As for the conduct of us Blues, defeated  tribes have often behaved in the clueless ways we Blue Americans now exhibit—and then, the invaders have come over the walls and have wiped groups like the Trojans away.

Stop Acting Like This Is Normal, the Ezra Klein headline says.

In our view, that's extremely good advice with respect to major figures like President Trump and Vance and Bessent and Hegseth and Bondi and Bobby. (Tens of millions of fellow citizens disagree with that view.) 

In our view, that's good advice with respect to the current administration, Sadly, it's also good advice concerning the behavior of Us.

Tomorrow: What Governor Pritzker also said

THE DEAD: It's general over Blue America!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2025

The paralysis afflicting the dead: In Thursday morning's report, we detailed the disappearance of Jeffrey Epstein's victims.

On Wednesday, they'd held a high-profile press event in front of the Capitol Building. On Thursday morning, they were disappeared by the apparently reinvented Washington Post. 

It was as we told you! As we scrolled down the front page of the Post's website, we had to scroll through thirty-one (31) headlines before we were offered a link to the Post's news report about what these victims had said. 

In that way, those survivors had been disappeared. Just to refresh your memory, a few of those 31 news reports and opinion columns had appeared beneath such headlines as these:

What’s the best frozen pizza brand? Our taste test found a clear winner.

This foliage map tells you when to see peak colors across the U.S.

NFL primer: Can the onside kick be saved?

The health risk linked to scrolling too long while on the toilet

The Post had invited us to click on those links before the paper was willing to tell us what Epstein's victims had said.

Also on Wednesday, the sitting president had said the Epstein thing was a "hoax." The Washington Post seemed to take things from there—and yesterday, after we returned from participation in the "every third Friday" medical cycle, we saw that the Post had published this editorial, dual headline included:

In defense of the War Department
Euphemisms such as “defense” and “security” have a tendency for bureaucratic mission-creep.

Euphemisms distort thought, and no entities are more adept at producing euphemisms than governments. President Donald Trump’s rebranding on Friday of the Department of Defense as the Department of War is a worthy blow against government euphemism. Perhaps it can be followed by clearer thinking about the military’s role at home and abroad.

[...]

Trump’s opponents complain about the aggressive connotations of the new name. But the United States is protected by the most lethal and vigilant fighting force ever assembled, no matter what it’s called. The new name could prompt more focused debate about how to use it.

Etcetera, and so forth and so on. As workmen vandalized a Washington building, scraping the word "Defense" away, the Washington Post was reciting President Trump's talking points:

This latest name change by the president was part of the war on euphemism! It was designed to lessen the likelihood that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth would send us off to war!

This morning, we saw the same lines being recited by all three friends in the first fifteen minutes of Fox & Friends Weekend. Meanwhile, why do we call it "vandalism" when workers peel that silly woke word off the side of that building?  

Simple! It's because the president doesn't seem to have the legal authority to rename that department. By law, it apparently remains the "The United States Department of Defense," until such time as Congress decides to act.

To appearances, Jeff Bezos may not have enough money yet. To appearances, he's vandalized the Washington Post to keep his dream of additional wealth alive.

Meanwhile, who sits on the editorial board at this new Washington Post? Who wrote and published that editorial?

Perhaps that masthead information exists somewhere. Late yesterday, we searched and searched and googled hard and we couldn't find a list of such names. 

To appearances, a second war is currently under way. It seems to us that the forces of Red America may already have won. 

In part, it's been the paralysis. It's the paralysis and the walking death—the ongoing death-in-life. In all the squalor we saw last night after returning from our day in the medical realm, we were perhaps most struck by the new column from David Brooks, which ran beneath this headline:

Why I Am Not a Liberal

We've long admired Brooks' work over the past dozen years. Also, there's zero reason why David Brooks, or anyone else, has to be "a liberal." 

That said, it seems to us that he keeps doing this at this point in time. Every time he offers a challenge to President Trump, he hurries back to his study carrel and presents something, perhaps a bit performatively, which points in a different direction.

A war is on, and we Blues have lost, or so it can seem over here. In many ways, we'd chalk it up to elite "paralysis" and to elite walking death.

Over the past few years, we've suggested that we can possibly see the outlines of this war more clearly through the auspices of literature:

We can see the "revolt from below" in every verse of the Iliad, with the furious Achaeans having spent ten years trying to get Helen back. That leads to Professor Knox's account of what occurred after the war poem ends—his memorable account of what happened when sacred Troy finally fell:

Professor Bernard Knox: 
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war...

So wrote Professor Knox. That's part of his lengthy introduction to Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad.

The Achaeans performed that night assault using the tools of war of the Late Bronze Age. The current night assault—the current furious revolt from below—is being enacted using the weapons of our own Information Age. It's happening as a paralysis is keeping Blue America's timorous elites off the playing field.

The Iliad helps us see the fury behind the angry revolt from below. Passages from The Plague help illustrate the way we Americans, of whatever political hue, have failed to see, failed to comprehend, what is occurring around us

Albert Camus, The Plague
The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor’s uncertainty and surprise—since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that come crashing down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

[...]

Our townsfolk were like everybody else...they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions...

Camus continued from there. In his account, the fictional townsfolk of Oran weren't built to see the pestilence which was slithering in around them.

To the Iliad and The Plague, we would now add The Dead. It's the famous final story in Dubliners, the collection of fifteen stories which the young Joyce described in a pair of letters to his recalcitrant publisher.

The publisher was too paralyzed to publish. He wanted material removed:

JOYCE (May 5, 1906): My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis...I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written. 

JOYCE (May 20, 1906): I have explained and argued everything at full length and, when argument and explanation were unavailing, I have perforce granted what you wished...The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book together. If I eliminate them, what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country. 

Rightly or wrongly, the young Joyce—he was just 24!—said he saw his own Dublin as "the center of [an unexplained type of] paralysis." It was a "spiritual" paralysis to which he referred, though as we noted on Thursday, the very first story started with the literal paralysis which had led to the death of the late Father Flynn.

Joyce said he was trying to "write a chapter in the moral history of my country."  He said he hoped that he had "taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country."

As we noted on Thursday, the word "paralysis" sits right there, in the very first paragraph of Dubliners' first story. The famous final story is the near novella called The Dead.

Recently, we were called away to The Dead because of a delusional comment by President Trump—the delusional comment he made to President Macron concerning his darling Vladimir:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

Incredibly, that's what the president said. It took us back to Gretta Conroy, describing poor Michael Furey in Joyce's famous text—poor Michael Furey, who had died for her, long before, when he was just 17.

He had courted her, at age 17, by singing "The Lass of Aughrim." Her husband, Gabriel Conroy, had never heard this story before—but he was suddenly hearing it now:

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

With that, she told her husband the fuller story—a story he'd never heard.

Gabriel Conroy's paralysis lies at the heart of this final story. Joyce reveals it slowly but surely, starting when Lily, the caretaker's daughter, unsettles him with this sudden remark as he arrives at the annual Twelfth Night party thrown by the Misses Morkan:

“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”

Lily's aim was true. Later, Miss Ivors seems to accuse him of being "a West Briton"—a Dubliner who may perhaps fancy the Brits. In the course of the story, Gabriel Conroy thinks about the literal dead, but walking death may perhaps have its eye on this decent man too.

In these times, as Blue America falls, it's the silence of the Blue American lambs where the paralysis and the (metaphorical) death can perhaps be seen. The observers in question are going to go to their cultural deaths without ever daring to say the things they all know to be true.

They're hanging on to "good jobs at good pay," to recall one of the sensible goals of the sensible Candidate Bill Clinton. They won't say what they actually think and think they know about the delusional President Trump, or about the apparent madness surrounding "Bobby" (and others).

In truth, they wouldn't know how to discuss the apparent illnesses which seem to afflict these men in much the way the Achaean leaders were driven by madness and rage. To appearances, neither their IQ nor their EQ equips them for such a task.

Gabriel Conroy's paralysis is subtly sketched by Joyce. He isn't insulted for his paralysis, but all through Joyce's famous story, hints of something like a paralysis are possibly shown to be there.

In ways those letters don't explain, Joyce wanted to liberate his country from the paralysis he thought he saw among his fellow Dubliners. As his story approaches its end, Gabriel Conroy's wife is asleep on their bed, her weeping having ended:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades [ghosts]. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live [without her].

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead...

He'd never felt like that himself, but Michael Furey had. Gabriel Conroy was himself among the walking dead, like the silent tribunes of Blue America who refuse to report what's happening around them and who refuse to discuss what they know.

They won't discuss the Fox News Channel at all, even though that's where that the troops are now coming over the walls. They refuse to say what they must think that know about President Trump, but also about such figures as Hegseth and Kennedy.

(As always, we advise you to pity the child.)

They won't report or discuss that channel at all. They won't say what they think they know about President Trump, who had the misfortune to be born to "a high-functioning sociopath."  

In the summer of 2020, the president's niece had written a challenging, best-selling book. Clinging to the rules of their guild, they continue to refuse to report what's in it.

"They were all becoming shades." So observed Gabriel Conroy, a perfectly good and decent person. 

By way of contrast, poor Michael Furey had insisted on singing "The Lass of Aughrim" in a cold, driving rain. Word of his death had reached the young woman who "was great with him at that time" roughly one week later.

He had never heard this story before. He sensed that something was missing or wrong.

Last chance before freeway: Don't cheat yourself of the chance to see Anjelica Huston perform that famous scene. 

"I think that he died for me," she says in the 1997 film. Unlike the confession to poor Macron, her assessment's aim was true.

"He was such a gentle boy," she says at one point. You won't see a lot of that as the Achaeans come over the walls, undiscussed, at the Fox News Channel. 

The Iliad, The Plague and The Dead. Do they help us see the various players with this war perhaps already lost?

BREAKING: It's the third Friday of the new cycle!

 FEIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2025

Gabriel Conroy's thoughts: Yes, it's the third Friday of the new and improved "every third Friday" medical cycle.

Despite that fact, we thought we'd be able to sneak away, at 10 a.m., to continue our look at Joyce's treatment of (metaphorical) "paralysis" and (metaphorical) "death." But given how way leads on to way, a minor, time-consuming complexification arose.

We do believe that Dubliners can help us contemporary Americans see ourselves as we currently actually are. We'll return to that task, most likely tomorrow, as we continue to ponder what Gretta Conroy's husband said, even if only internally:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

That passage appears two paragraphs from the end of the final story in Dubliners, the widely acclaimed near-novella, "The Dead." But what could we learn from pondering that internal monologue? 

Also, where's the (metaphorical) paralysis here in our own Blue American world? From the Blue perspective, the Achaeans are coming over the walls again, as they first did in the days of the Iliad. What can we learn from Joyce's portraits of his era's (metaphorically) paralyzed Dubliners?

We need to see ourselves more clearly. Sometimes we can learn to do such things through the intercession of books!

Also this: Hey! We're typing as fast as we can!

THURSDAY: The revolt of the furious students, on Fox!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2025

The furious gentleman's tale: Personally, we wish that Governor Walz would stop making unhelpful comments.

To appearances, the comments are meant to be amusing. They help the pro-MAGA side.

We also think that Blue America should be aware of the way the Fox News Channel is changing the shape of the public discourse within the "cable news" realm.

Yesterday, the furious children on The Five were unhappy with Governor Walz. Inevitably, resident silly boy Jesse Watters teased the program's second segment with this sad remark:

WATTERS (9/3/25): Up next, Trump's not dead—and Tampon is upset.

At this point, he doesn't even call him "Tampon Tim!" To this silliest of all American children, his name is simply "Tampon."

On the nation's most-watched "cable news" program, the gentleman's name is now "Tampon." When it came time for Greg Gutfeld to speak, the angry lad went with this:

GUTFELD: What can you say about Tim Walz that hasn't already been said in Deliverance? 

[LAUGHTER]

The guy is a creep. He is a blubbering eunuch.

The Dems really messed with America before Trump returned, but one of the worst things they did was introduce us to this—I was going to say "retard," but I can't say that—this asshole to a wider audience. 

We were so better off not knowing who he was. And now that we know that he exists and that he just plays to an audience, he's a loser and he's a scumbag.

The furious fellow couldn't say "retard." So he went with "asshole" instead!

Increasingly, the children traffic in news analysis of that type, in which the disfavored person is a retard, an asshole, a scumbag. In this way, as we've noted before, Gutfeld's unregulated fury is being transferred from his own gruesome TV show down to the world of The Five. 

Experts now refer to this sort of thing as "The revolt (or the revenge) of the D-minus students." They've been angry for a long time, and Fox is now letting them vent.

For the record:

The Fox News Channel no longer BLEEPS the analytical term, "asshole." On the brighter side, no one said that Walz is gay on yesterday's program, unless "eunuch" and Deliverance count.

This seems to be who these children are. This seems to be what they have.

Dana Perino laughs it off. She's there to create an impression.

THE DEAD: What might a modern "paralysis" look like?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2025

Plus, his strangest behavior yet: Way back in 1914, James Joyce's collection of fifteen stories began with thoughts of "paralysis."

The collection bears the sacred name, Dubliners. Boasting a youthful, first-person narrator, the first story started like this:

The Sisters

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

That's the first paragraph of the young Joyce's sacred first book. "Paralysis" is sitting right there, marked by its "deadly work.".

As it turned out, Father Flynn had died "a paralytic," felled by his third stroke. The paralysis introduced here had delivered him to the ranks of the (literally) dead.

Way back in 1906, the very young Joyce—he was just 24—had written to a timid, slightly paralyzed publisher, describing the intention behind his unusual book:

"My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis."

At any rate, the cycle of stories started right there, with the literal death of the literally paralyzed Father Flynn. It ended with the longest story in the collection, the near novella which bears this famous title:

The Dead

The young Joyce wasn't playing around, even at age 24!

As we present-day Americans seek to understand the death-in-life of our own failing nation, we might consider abandoning the 24-second news cycle which now defeats our understanding. We might consider replacing it with certain similarities which may be lurking inside Joyce's first published text.

Last night, the garbage was general over the Fox News Channel. There seems to be very little "paralysis" over there.

Within the elites of Blue America, the situation may seem to be different. Consider the headlines one can see, this very morning, on the web site of the venerable Washington Post.

A bit more than fifty years ago, the Washington Post exploded into major prominence with its investigation of the "Watergate" matter. 

It's a different paper today. This morning, at 7:45 a.m., these were the first ten (10) headlines seen on the front page of its web site. Each of these headlines offered readers a link:

The Washington Post 

Trump officials ask Supreme Court to quickly allow sweeping tariffs

Inside the Trump team’s conflicting efforts to mend ties with India

RFK Jr. drives a wedge between red and blue states on vaccines

The case of the stolen pigeons:
Chinese tycoons turned pigeon racing into one of the world’s most lucrative sports. Then the thefts began.

House GOP weighing bills to remove elected D.C. attorney general, overhaul justice policies

At D.C. Superior Court, a system up at all hours under Trump’s order

National Guard deployment in D.C. expected to be extended for months

Plastic exposure before birth can leave babies with lifelong fertility issues

What’s the best frozen pizza brand? Our taste test found a clear winner.
The supermarket freezer aisle is awash in ready-to-bake pizzas. We found a clear favorite.

This foliage map tells you when to see peak colors across the U.S. 
This year’s map forecasts an early arrival of colors in the Northeast, while the West Coast and Southeast may experience foliage delays.

In this age of the flooding of the zone, most of those headlines linked to serious news reports about actual news topics. The stolen pigeons and the best frozen pizza were possibly included just for fun. Plus the foliage map!

At any rate, there they sat—the newspapers top ten headlines! After that, as we continued to scroll, we encountered this array of eight (8) "stories" which offered us even more news:

More top stories

Texas moves to allow anyone to sue abortion pill prescribers, distributors

Death toll rises to 17 after Lisbon’s popular Glória funicular derails

Trump administration rescinds protected status for 250,000 Venezuelans

Trump ordered strike on suspected drug boat to send a message, Rubio says

D.C. can predict who will get into car crashes but can’t stop them

Heard on a hot mic: Xi and Putin discuss living to age 150

House Republicans form new subcommittee to reinvestigate Jan. 6 attack

Putin may live to 150? A Post subscriber may have to live that long to encounter reporting about the topic for which we were searching this day!

We'd now encountered links to eighteen (18) different news reports. At this point, as we scrolled on, we encountered a section bearing this name:

Latest from The Post

The section included eight (8) additional offerings. Two of the eight were these:

Analysis / Mark Maske 
NFL primer: Can the onside kick be saved? Plus, the top games in Week 1.

Analysis / Neil Greenberg
Predicting win-loss records for all 32 NFL teams

The count was now 26. After that came the day's "Better Living" section. Links were offered to four (4) more reports, not excluding these

Column / Ellie Krieger
Pear overnight oats show why this breakfast has stood the test of time

The health risk linked to scrolling too long while on the toilet

By now, we subscribers had been directed (or misdirected) to thirty (30) offerings. Now we came to another section. Its featured report was this:

Politics & Government

Judge rules Trump administration cannot withhold funding from Harvard

That was a perfectly serious topic. By now, our roll stood at 31.

As we'd scrolled down the Post's front page, we'd been invited to click on 31 links. Finally, we reviewed a set of six additional reports in that same Politics & Government section

This subset was offered in smaller print. Finally, though, we saw the topic for which we'd been searching. The link to it read like this:

Epstein accusers join lawmakers to push for full release of documents

At long last, there it stood! 

Yesterday, this event had been widely featured on two of the three major "cable news" channels. Perhaps a bit paralytically, perhaps driven by deference to power and by a bit of fear, the Washington Post had managed to squeeze it in at number 32 on today's play list:

That placed it below the discussion of onside kicks, and below the news report about the danger of excessive toilet scrolling. We've reported, now you can decide!

As decent people, we whispered a silent prayer of thanksgiving. We thanked the God of all Irish Catholics for the fact that the ambitious young Joyce never had to see this version of what might be a form of a type of moral "paralysis."

As for our youthful analysts, their souls swooned slowly as they heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. 

(We're borrowing from the closing paragraph of The Dead as we bring you that report.)

Yesterday, there they were, the survivors or victims—take your pick—of Jeffrey Epstein and Gislaine Maxell, a pair of convicted criminals. 

Yesterday, they told their stories in a press event outside the Capitol Building. On CNN and MSNBC, this was treated, throughout the day and on into the evening, as a major news event.

On the Fox News Channel—no paralysis there!—the various messenger pigeons found a different array of topics with which to fills their hours. Various targets were slimed again when Greg Gutfeld took to the air.

It was a major event on two news channels, almost wholly avoided on one. This morning, at the Washington Post, the event had barely occurred.

The New York Times did somewhat better. In this morning's print editions, the report appears inside the paper, on page A14. 

It didn't make the paper's front page. It's listed as the fifth of eighteen news reports in the online "National" section.

It appears right below the fourth report. As seen in print editions, here are the headlines in question:

Brewery Owner in Maine Joins Push to Unseat Collins

G.O.P. Leaders Thwart Epstein Disclosure Bill as Accusers Plead for Files

Accusers had been pleading for files, the headline said. Here's the headline which appears online, along with the opening paragraphs:

G.O.P. Thwarts Epstein Disclosure Bill as Accusers Plead for Files

With the Capitol towering behind them, several women who said they had been among Jeffrey Epstein’s victims shared harrowing stories of sexual abuse, pleading with members of Congress to demand that the Trump administration release all of its investigative files in the case.

Lawmakers in both parties stood behind them, vowing to keep the pressure on for the disclosures.

Even one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, said the files must come out.

None of it appeared to be enough to outweigh the pressure from Mr. Trump and Republican leaders, who have moved quickly to squelch legislation that would require the Justice Department to quickly and completely release what it uncovered about Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Momentum was flagging behind an effort by Representatives Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, to force the House to vote on the measure, after most Republicans who initially said they would back it fell in line with the president’s exhortations to let the issue die.

We aren't saying that report is wrong, though the BBC said that the "several" women were actually nine in number. We're saying that a bit of "paralysis" may have infested the treatment of this topic at the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, here's something you may not get to read about at the Post or at the Times. Under present arrangements, you have to go to Mediaite to learn about bizarre behavior like this:

Trump Goes on Bizarre, Digitally-Altered Posting Bender About His Political Enemies

President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of Truth Social posts featuring digitally altered videos of some of his political enemies on Wednesday night. The posts featured some of his favorite targets, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

After publishing boilerplate posts about the Social Security Administration and his meeting with the president of Poland earlier in the day, the president’s timeline got weird, even by his posting standards.

Intriguing! Just how "weird" were the president's posts? Was his bender really "bizarre?"

We're going to say that it very much was—that it was the most bizarre yet. Michael Luciano's report continues along as shown, but you'll have to click over to his report to actually see the apparent illness which might seem to be involved here:

The bizarre bender began with a post about Rosie O’Donnell, who moved to Ireland after Trump won last year’s election. (Screenshots of the president’s posts are posted below instead of embedded posts, as Truth Social’s embed feature seems to be non-functional with some content management systems):

“As previously mentioned, we are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s Citizenship,” Trump wrote. “She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!”

This would be the last post in the series that included text. The rest were AI videos or videos that had been otherwise altered in some way.

They included a video of Schiff with an elongated neck...

And so on from there. 

The president had started with a suggestion that Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship might now be revoked. That was high sanity compared to what came next. 

You'll have to click to Luciano's report to see those altered photos. Incredibly, this is what the president has apparently posted concerning Senator Schiff.

Is something wrong with President Trump? We've asked this fairly obvious question again and again, noting that any such situation would of course be tragic state of affairs.

We've asked and asked and asked. You'll have to turn to the extremely strange visuals at Mediaite to encounter what seems to be an answer to that question.

"Silence invaded the suburbs," the poet Auden said, in honor of the poet Yeats. 

("Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest...")

Has a type of paralysis, in the form of a silence, invaded the Washington Post? 

Regarding the victims of Epstein and Maxwell, yesterday's open air presser had seemed to be a fairly substantial event. It was virtually disappeared by the Post, given somewhat limited play at the Times. 

More broadly, these newspapers refuse to discuss the possible state of the president's mental health, with respect to which we would strongly suggest that you look at the visuals which appear at Mediaite via the Truth Social site.

Our question:

Might we see portraits of our current Blue American selves in the page of Dubliners? In its final story, The Dead? 

Are we Blues possibly trapped in a form of walking death, in a form of moral paralysis? If we want to see ourselves more clearly, should we perhaps step back from the current news cycle? Might we try to look inside such honored writing instead?

Tomorrow: Additional language from The Dead:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

WEDNESDAY: There's little sign of paralysis...

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

...from Red America's messaging persons: Has anyone ever changed as much as JD Vance weirdly has?

We're speaking about the two Vances:

The thoughtful, humorous JD Vance who published Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, then sat for a series of high-profile interviews in support of the widely praised memoir.

The JD Vance who exists today—the JD Vance of the ugly "the Haitians are eating Ohio's pets" claim of the 2024 campaign.

How did the first person turn into the second? At Mediaite, Colby Hall offers the latest dope about that second person:

JD Vance’s Warning About Trump ‘Death Bed’ Misinformation Was… Misinformation

Vice President JD Vance just pulled off a very 2025 trick: warning about fake news by making some up.

Following a few days of bizarre and baseless rumors—primarily from far left social media trolls and influencers—about President Donald Trump’s health, Vance logged onto X and wrote:

“If the media you consumed told you that Donald Trump was on his death bed because he didn’t do a press conference for 3 days, imagine what else they’re lying to you about.”

It’s a neat line. Punchy. Timely. But also false. No credible outlet—not The New York Times, not CNN, not Fox, not even the most fringe clickbait—reported Trump was on his death bed. The story existed only in rumor mills and the viral, self-feeding algorithms of social media, mainly on the cesspool that X has become...

And so on from there. 

In fairness, the new Vance can hide behind the ambiguity of the slick and useful term, "the media." But today, at the age of (just turned) 41, is there any bogus claim this once genial fellow isn't ready to peddle?

This week, we're searching the early stories of Joyce, focusing on the theme of societal "paralysis" and metaphorical death. Among the messaging agents of Red America, there's little sign of any "paralysis" at the present time.

In our view, those messaging agents are characterized by their apparent inability to regulate their anger and their endless sense of grievance. Paralysis isn't them!  As an example of what we mean, consider what happened last night, when Suzanne Scott pried the lid off the can at 10 p.m. (7 p.m. out on the coast) and Greg Gutfeld came slithering out.

He was supported by four flyweight guests. There was little sign of "paralysis."

If you're willing to watch this angry, dimwitted child, you can see him pursue his favorite targets and themes in his opening two or three minutes of jokes:

Themes of opening jokes: September 2, 2025
Favorite target Greta Thunberg has an unsightly haircut.

Favorite target Rosie O'Donnell allegedly has herpes—and she got it from a toilet seat!

Favorite target Rashida Tlaib has an unsightly mustache.

Little "paralysis" is evident in the behaviors of this emotionally crippled child. (He turns 61 next week.) Needless to say, favorite target Jerry Nadler also turned up in a set of jokes which featured the standard perspective:

GUTFELD (9/2/25): Representative Jerry Nadler announced he is retiring after 34 years in Congress.

AUDIENCE: [Cheering, applause]

GUTFELD: He is citing a need for change, referring to his trousers.

I'm not going to say he ruins a lot of pants, but his dry cleaner did kill himself. 

But if I know Nadler, we haven't heard the last from him.

[Sounds of a flushing toilet]

That's the first time we've used sound effects in a joke, and I think it went really well.

Judged by any recognizable standard, something is wrong in this strange fellow's head. The paralysis starts when Blue America's timorous elites agree that they should refuse to report or discuss his behavior.

Other favorite targets were soon hit in Gutfeld's "issue monologue." That included favorite target Taylor Swift, who is typically derided on this prehuman, braindead show because she's "just a 5."

For the record, the little guy opened his program with a favorite unsupported rumor about favorite target Ilhan Omar. For PolitiFact's fact-check of the tired old rumor, just click this. For the Snopes fact-check (rating: Unfounded), you can just click here.

Very little paralysis holds this nutcase back. Paralysis enters the world of our dying society's failing discourse when Blue America's timorous tribunes all agree that his braindead, destructive behavior must, at all costs, be ignored.

He starts with poop, slides downhill from there. We do advise you to pity the child, but he and his nitwit "cable news" guests make it quite hard to do that.

Suzanne Scott pries the lid off the can. This stupid, sad garbage slides out.

THE DEAD: The analysts screamed when Stephanie Ruhle...

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

...tried to perform a fact check: It's increasingly painful to observe what sits in the place of our failed American discourse.

Last night, for example, Stephanie Ruhle was back from a late summer absence. Sadly enough, reality forced her to deal with these statement by the sitting American president:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (9/2/25): Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now...

We'll, we're going in [to Chicago with federal troops]. I didn't say when, but we're going in...

We have the right to do it, because I have an obligation to protect this country. And that includes Baltimore...

 I’m very proud of Washington. It serves as a template. And we’re going to do it elsewhere. But Chicago is certainly going to be high.

Baltimore, "what they need is housing." No, they don’t need housing. They need is to get rid of the criminals.

We're showing you the snippets that Ruhle ran. "In the wickedness of the times" (Plato), we know of no place where a citizen can see a transcript of the president's full remarks. 

In the next day or two, the invaluable Rev may produce such a transcript. Or then again, possibly not.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our discourse is barely breathing. Before we elaborate on that remark, we offer a minor aside:

We ourselves just spent a glorious weekend in one of the hellholes in question. The weather was astoundingly good, as was the glorious walking.

The longer weekend, mixed with the broadcast of several intriguing football games, produced a fugue-infested weekend here on the streets where we live. We recall what sacred Thoreau wrote in Walden, at the start of the chapter called Solitude:

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...

No, it wasn't quite that good. But we were out and about, in glorious weather, inside an American hellhole. 

No hellhole is visible on the streets where we live. There may well be hellholes elsewhere in "fair Baltimore, the beautiful city"—in particular neighborhoods, on particular streets, within particular homes.

There may be hellholes elsewhere here. That said, the rantings and the rage of this disordered man won't likely be helpful at any point—and Ruhle was soon trying to fact-check his statements.

More specifically, she tried to offer a fact-check of this Truth Social post by the ranting commander in chief:

CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

In the end, such ranting won't likely be helpful. 

It was still just 11:01 p.m. when Ruhle tried to perform a fact-check. The analysts groaned, then tore at their hair, when they saw her say this:

RUHLE (9/2/25): For fact's sake, Tijuana, Mexico has the highest homicide rate in the world. And despite Chicago being the third biggest city in America, its murder rate falls below red state cities like Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and St. Louis, Missouri.

Sad. According to FBI data, Chicago's murder rate is, in fact, far lower than the murder rates of quite a few American cities. But sad! 

The size of a city isn't directly connected in any way to its murder rate! Please don't ask us to explain this remarkably bone-simple point.

Is Chicago "THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD," in the predictable way President All Caps decided to rant? This morning, we traveled across the pond to The Times of London in search of clarification.

As usual, the Times of New York is glossing—seems to be disappearing—President Trump's "hellhole" remarks. By way of contrast, The Times of London was actually willing to speak:

Trump to send National Guard to ‘hellhole cities’ in governor showdown

[...]

Trump has so far deployed members of the National Guard, a state-based reservist force, to Los Angeles and Washington, citing the high crime rates. On Tuesday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

However, the three cities that had the highest murder rates in the US last year are all in Republican states, according to the latest FBI data. Birmingham in Alabama, St Louis in Missouri and Memphis in Tennessee recorded more than 40 murders per 100,000 people.

The next two cities with the highest murder rates in the US—Baltimore and Detroit—are in states with Democratic governors. Chicago recorded 17.5 murders per 100,000 people last year.

In fact, according to the FBI data, Chicago's murder rate is dwarfed by those in Birmingham and St. Louis. It's less than half the murder rate found in Memphis. 

That said, none of this has much to do with the desire to address the horrors of violent crime. Neither does the incessant clowning of the clown-car sitting president.

The analysts screamed at the statistical illiteracy Ruhle introduced into her program. Soon, her producers were flashing her standard, embarrassing slogan as she introduced her first panel of guests:

LET'S GET SMARTER

By the time they were forced to see that silly slogan flash on the screen, the youthful analysts were openly weeping. In our minds, we returned to the themes of paralysis and (metaphorical) death found in the fifteen stories of Joyce's famous collection, Dubliners.

You may think we're picking nits when we complain about Ruhle's bungle. If you have some such reaction, we're forced to report that you're wrong.

With respect to the young Joyce's collection of stories, the question to which we return is this:

In some way, can we modern Americans see ourselves reflected somehow in his early stories? In the stories about the spiritual paralysis he though the saw within the Ireland of the early twentieth century?

Blinded by the flooding of the zone and by the speed of the modern news cycle, we Americans need to learn to see ourselves with more clarity. Can we possibly see ourselves in the early Joyce's first stories?

Was their "paralysis" our paralysis? Joyce described his intention in letters to the timorous publisher who kept refusing to publish Dubliners.

The publisher wanted certain parts of the stories to be softened, thrown away—disappeared. Joyce described his purpose thusly:

JOYCE (May 5, 1906): As for my part and share in the book I have already told all I have to tell. My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis...I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written. 

JOYCE (May 20, 1906): You cannot see anything impossible or unreasonable in my position. I have explained and argued everything at full length and, when argument and explanation were unavailing, I have perforce granted what you wished, and even when you didn’t ask, [sic] me to grant. The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book together. If I eliminate them, what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country. 

Joyce had just turned 24 when he wrote those letters. He believed that he had composed a "moral history of [his] country." 

Rightly or wrongly, he believed that the Ireland of his youth was trapped is a form of "paralysis"—and the lengthy story which closed the collection bore this famous title:

The Dead

He believed he saw a type of paralysis gripping his nation back then. Is our own failing nation tapped in a type of paralysis now?

Unfortunately, there's little "paralysis" in the caterwauling emerging from the tribunes of Red America on a round-the-clock basis. If some such paralysis exists, it's found over here, with us Blues.

The analysts screamed when Stephanie Ruhle introduced that bone-simple bungle. The Times of London has already critiqued what the president said. As with other presidential screeds, it's being hushed up over here.

At any rate, the weather was beautiful, all weekend long, here in the heart of a hellhole. Children were attacking the sidewalks with chalk. Click here to enjoy a forgotten old song, the song called "The Baltimore Fire."

This afternoon: It came from the garbage can

Also, the lyrics: As sung by the New Lost City Ramblers:

"Fire, fire" I heard the cry
From every breeze that passes by
All the world was one sad cry of pity.

Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling out to heaven for aid
While the fire in ruins was laying
Fair Baltimore, the beautiful city.

TUESDAY: When the president went there again...

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2025

...none of the friends said a word: Is there a type of "paralysis" infesting come significant portion of our failing nation's population? Could some of the people so infested be thought of as "The Dead?"

We took the crazy gamble this morning of flirting with such questions. 

We're starting our new narrative year with the speculative possibility that we Americans are trapped in some sort of "collective paralysis." That certain segments of the society are, metaphorically, among the spiritual dead.

Who might we have in mind? It's hard to attempt an analysis of the American discourse without citing the endless profusion of events such as this:

Trump WH Roasted For Wild $8 Trillion Whopper: ‘Amazing–And Insanely Wrong!’

The Trump White House sparked a wave of condemnation after Labor Day Weekend with a social media post boasting it had taken in a whopping “$8 trillion in tariff revenue.”

The White House posted an image of Trump and the caption, “President Trump’s protectionist trade policies have helped drive more than $8 trillion in new U.S. investment, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.” The image also included the caption, “$8 TRILLION IN TARIFF REVENUE, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF NEW JOBS.”

Critics were quick to point out obvious, glaring errors in the post—and others made over the weekend. The conservative Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Reidl shared the post and added...

You can click to see what Riedl said. Reason's Nick Gillespie offered this:

“Amazing–and insanely wrong! Trump claims ‘$8 trillion in tariff revenue.’ In all of 2024, total imports came to $3.7 trillion.”

There our tribunes went again, using the language of mental health—but using it only in a colloquial manner.

For whatever reason, the White House seems to have issued an astonishing howler. Because its presentation dealt with tariff revenue, we thought back to the early moments of Monday's Fox & Friends program—to the magic moments we briefly mentioned, then passed over, in this morning's report.

Yesterday morning, in real time, we were struck by how quickly the propaganda starts on Fox News Channel programs where everyone on the panel will agree, by force of law, with everything that everyone else has said. You may remember who the three friends were this day:

Fox & Friends: Monday, September 1, 2025
Lawrence Jones: co-host, Fox & Friends
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor

There they sat at 6 a.m., ready to advance the various mandated messaging points. At 6:03, Compagno enthusiastically offered this about the amazing economy:

COMPAGNO (9/1/25): The president himself is weighing in, putting this on Truth Social...

With that, she read the president's post. It involved the miracle of tariffs. Here's the text of what she read:

"Prices are ‘WAY DOWN' in the USA, with virtually no inflation. With the exception of ridiculous, corrupt politician-approved ‘Windmills,' which are killing every State and Country that uses them, Energy prices are falling, ‘big time.' Gasoline is at many-year lows. All of this despite magnificent Tariffs, which are bringing in Trillions of Dollars from Countries that took total advantage of us, for decades, and are making America STRONG and RESPECTED AGAIN!!!"

There the fellow went again! Try to ignore the other claims, including the claims about windmills. But with respect to the magic of tariffs, there he went again!

Once again, there he went, seeming to say that tariff revenues are submitted to the treasury by foreign governments or other foreign entities. Tariff revenues are free money! The president said it again!

Nothing seems to stop him from making this groaning misstatement. Presumably, Jones or Jones or Compagno herself must have known that the president's representation was bogus.

Did Jones and Jones and Compagno know? We'll assume that at least one of them did! But Compagno politely read the text of the president's post—and none of the friends said a word.

Has a paralysis affected these players? Could they possibly be thought of as the (metaphorical) dead?

At this site, we think of them as messenger children, but also as "Unrecognizables." We'll have more on this type of conduct as the week proceeds, but we're thinking of a different group when we encounter Joyce's language—his language from Dubliners, culminating with The Dead.

There the president went again! Meanwhile, how odd:

Red America's corporate "friends" refuse to talk about President Trump. Meanwhile, Blue America's progressional journalists refuse to talk about them!

We regard the friends as "Unrecognizables." What can we say about the people who refuse to report or discuss the various things they say and do?

It was 6:03 on Monday morning. Compagno tread the text of the howler and she and her friends moved on!

THE DEAD: The Stupid is general over the culture!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2025

Also, perhaps, the dead: Last week's endless "cabinet meeting" brought an earlier event to mind.

The "cabinet meeting" ran a full three hours and seventeen minutes. It opened with President Trump orating for 48 minutes. 

At that point, the president threw to "Bobby"—to his frequently criticized Secretary of Health and Human Services. Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can peruse a transcript of all that transpired—of every word that was said.

A somewhat peculiar exchange between the president and the secretary brought the earlier event to mind. In this news report, the New York Times recalled the earlier incident:

How the Trump-Kennedy Alliance Is Pushing the Boundaries of Public Health

Before he began his remarks on health care policy at a White House event earlier this summer, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. first felt the need to praise one of President Trump’s passion projects.

Mr. Kennedy said that Mr. Trump’s new Oval Office décor had “transformed” a White House that comparatively looked “drab” when his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, filled it. “Under your stewardship, it looks extraordinary today,” Mr. Kennedy said as Mr. Trump nodded in approval. “So thank you, Mr. President.”

During a three-hour cabinet meeting this week, it was Mr. Trump’s turn to support Mr. Kennedy’s endeavors: researching any link between vaccines and autism, a theory that many medical professionals and studies have debunked....

And so on from there. 

For the record, the earlier White House event took place on July 30. Before discussing health care policy on that earlier occasion, Kennedy had apparently felt the need to blather on like this:

KENNEDY (7/30/25): Thank you very much, Mr. President and I just want to begin by making a comment that is irrelevant to what we're gathered here today to talk about. 

But I've been coming to this building for 65 years and I have to say that it has never looked better. And I've spent some time—I've spent some time in the Oval Office, which really has—it's been transformed.

And I was looking at a picture of the Oval Office the other day when I was there, when I was a kid with my uncle and it was an extraordinary—it's always an extraordinary to go into that sacred space. But I have to say that it looked kind of drab in the pictures, and they were black and white pictures but looked drab, and it looks the opposite of drab today.

[Addressing reporters] And I think—I know all these portraits. I hope you get a chance to look at them when you go out there, that they were hand-picked by the president. And many of them hijacked from other agencies that were trying to keep them.

But I mean, you know, my uncle, my Aunt Jackie, who were deeply committed to design, to beauty and who understood that it's important to have our public buildings be beautiful because it inspires us, it elevates the human spirit. It's one of the—it's a template, it's an exemplar for democracy, the releasing through freedoms of the creativity of the human spirit and this building, of all buildings, should look beautiful.

And under your stewardship, it looks extraordinary today. So thank you, Mr. President, for that. 

That earlier event had started with the president orating for more than ten minutes. When Kennedy was finally asked to speak, he burned away two additional minutes with that "irrelevant comment."

Even Aunt Jackie couldn't match the president's mastery of design and beauty, the admiring secretary admiringly said. 

As he did, he enhanced his branding as a Trump-admiring Kennedy, while orating within an increasingly peculiar realm. Some observers have begun to think that the realm in question might be North Korea adjacent!

The spectacular dumbness of the secretary's remarks in July has become a bit of a trademark. Leaders from around the world seem to have decided that the only way to approach the sitting president is with words of fawning praise.

To appearances, Russian patriot Vladimir Putin has become a master of the technique. Today, he continues to add to the dead of Ukraine, weeks after President Trump applauded him as he disembarked from his plane at Alaska's subarctic summit.

The president applauded the strongman that day, back on August 15. In a recent interview, he now seems to have said he got fooled by his Russkie darling and friend during the ballyhooed meeting.

"I thought I had it done" that day, the president somewhat oddly said, during a lengthy interview with a very young journalist from the very pro-MAGA site, The Daily Caller.

The young journalist who conducted the lengthy interview is three years out of college (Hillsdale College, class of 2022). She may go on to become a truly outstanding journalist. Also, there's no law requiring her, or anyone else, to be anti-MAGA.

For now, rightly or wrongly, she may be very pro-MAGA. She seemed to enjoy the president's sense of humor when he "announced a new piece of art in the White House—a portrait of former President Joe Biden’s autopen." 

The sheer stupidity of such events never ends at this point. Here's the start of Mediaite's report on that bit of news from the sitting president:

Trump Mocks Biden’s Autopen With a Portrait in the White House: ‘This Is Going To Be Very Controversial’

President Donald Trump has announced a new piece of art in the White House—a portrait of former President Joe Biden’s autopen.

The president shared the detail in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, which published the full transcript of Trump’s conversation with reporter Reagan Reese on Monday.

“We put up a picture of the autopen,” Trump told Reese, who responded, “Oh, that’s hilarious.”

It is not exactly clear where the portrait will hang. The Daily Caller’s transcript said Trump showed Reese multiple versions of the picture and what it “will look like in the Rose Garden,” but portraits are not typically displayed in the outdoor space. Either way, Trump said the painting will be unveiled in about two weeks.

And so on, oddly, from there. All in all, the beautification of the White House continues, as does the support of journalistic admirers. Under present arrangement, no matter what the president does, the troops are there to support him.

At this site, we regard that "portrait of the autopen" plan as an example of sheer stupidity. Others will assess it differently.

That said, the cheerleading conduct extends through the days at the Fox News Channel. Yesterday morning, we were struck, as we often are, by how quickly the spread of propaganda starts.

It was 6 o'clock on Labor Day morning. A trio of friends had been assembled to message on the weekday show, Fox & Friends.

Given that it was a holiday, two of the friends were substitute friends. The lineup looked like this:

Fox & Friends: Monday, September 1, 2025
Lawrence Jones: co-host, Fox & Friends
Emily Compagno: co-host, Outnumbered
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor

The propaganda—and the comical misstatements of fact—started with remarkable speed.

Given how way leads on to way, we may never be able to get back to the stream of silly remarks uttered by those corporate messenger children. That said:

At 6:07, the analysts came right out of the chairs when Compagno chided observers from the liberal world who like to weigh in with their views "in a siloed fashion." And yes, she actually said it!

There is no way to keep up with the steady stream of inanity which now defines the successor to the American national discourse. But as the aforementioned Russkie patriot continues to add to the ranks of the dead, you can be sure that you'll never see any friends on that "cable news" channel offer anything resembling fair and balanced coverage of our sitting president's exploits.

Long ago and far away, Joyce published a famous story—a story called The Dead. It was part of the collection called Dubliners. 

Joyce had written all the stories by 1907, when he was just 25. It took him seven more years to get someone to publish the famous collection.

The Dead is the longest and the final story in Dubliners. According to the leading authority on the story, "T. S. Eliot called [it] one of the greatest short stories ever written in English." It may seem dry as dust to the contemporary reader, since most of us will have little idea of the context within which it was written.

As we recently noted, that leading authority says that The Dead "offers a critique of a society that has been gripped by a deadening paralysis of the spirit." In its treatment of the Dubliners collection, that same authority tells us this:

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, written from 1904 to 1907. First published in 1914, Dubliners presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early twentieth century.

The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. Joyce felt Irish nationalism, like Catholicism and British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis—a theme permeating much of the work. He conceived of Dubliners as a "nicely polished looking-glass" held up to the Irish and a "first step towards spiritual liberation."

The young Joyce felt that Ireland was in the grip of a deadening paralysis. He might have been right or he might have been wrong, but could that analysis possibly hold a mirror up to us—to the metaphorical dead of our own failing society? 

It sems to us that we all need to step outside the "operation warp speed" of our current imitation of a national discourse. We may need to seek ourselves out with the help of various works of literature. 

Is some collective paralysis of the spirit possibly here among us? Who among us, Red or Blue, might be part of the collective paralysis—might perhaps be identified as the walking and talking dead?

We need to put our warp speed away. The blinding speed of our imitation of discourse is only going to fail us.

Tomorrow: The paralysis is Us?

MONDAY: Tomorrow starts a new narrative year!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2025

Michael Palin, but also The Dead: There are various types of year.

The calendar year starts on January 1. The fiscal years starts three months earlier, on October 1.

Within our own experience, the school year always started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Southern and southwestern states often started earlier than that.

Tomorrow, we'll be starting the new narrative year. We'll be trying to define the state of play here within our own split nation as the existing United States continues to come undone. 

We've described the ongoing circumstance as a "revolt from below." By our own reckoning, this involves an ongoing war which we denizens of Blue America have quite possibly already lost.

Tomorrow, we'll start to try to sketch that scenario with greater clarity. We'll continue along with this award-winning premise:

To understand the ongoing situation, we need to step back from our failing culture's 24-second news cycle.  Instead, we need to understand the nature of the current warfare through portrayals which already exist in the pages, and in the verses, of pre-existing literature.

Borrowing from Frost, we need to step "back out of all this now too much for us"—back out of that bewildering flooding of the zone. 

That's our prescription for a fuller understanding of what has already occurred. For the record, we know of no reason to think that any such strategy might allow Blue America to withstand the ongoing "night assault."

Along the way, we've worked from various literary texts. Readers groan when these titles reappear:

The Iliad: Homer
The Plague: Camus
My Antonia: Cather
humanity i love you: Cummings
People: Yevtushenko
I Pity the Poor Immigrant: Dylan
The Gift Outright: Frost

Also, we've frequently cited this text—the most ignored text in the cosmos:

Too Much and Never Enough: Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.

This week, we'll be adding two titles to the list:

The Dead: Joyce
Michael Palin in North Korea: Palin

Michael Palin in North Korea? The leading authority on the program tells us this about that:

Michael Palin in North Korea

Michael Palin in North Korea...is a travel documentary presented by Michael Palin and first aired in the UK in 2 parts on Channel 5 on 20 September and 27 September 2018.

Program history

The program was made by ITN Productions, who had proposed a North Korean documentary to various channels under the title Let's All Go To North Korea. Channel 5's Director of Programs Ben Frow was not interested in the project at first, but after Michael Palin was hired to front the program, he changed his mind and decided to commission it for the channel.

Michael Palin in North Korea recorded viewing figures of 4.5 million viewers and was nominated for two BAFTAs...

International airings

The documentary aired on 30 September 2018 in North America on National Geographic with the title North Korea From the Inside With Michael Palin.

Episodes

In the first episode Palin arrives in North Korea on a train from China. He is greeted by his guides, a woman named Li Soo-young and a man named Li Kyung-chul. Palin's guides bring him to sites across Pyongyang, including statues of the first leader of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, and his son and the DPRK's second leader Kim Jong-il.

In the second episode Palin celebrates his 75th-birthday in North Korea, and travels to the Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea, the ancient Korean capital at Kaesong, Mount Kumgang, and the coastal city of Wonsan. Palin then flies from Wonsan to Mount Paektu on the border with China before returning to Pyongyang, where he visits members of the North Korean national taekwondo team.

The synopsis omits the core of the program—Palin's friendship, and his barely disguised romance of the heart, with his charming young North Korean minder, Li Soo-young (spelling uncertain). Late in Episode 2, that narrative backbone culminates in the scene which YouTube presents in full:

Michael Palin: North Korea—Criticizing The Leaders Is Criticizing Ourselves

It's part of the way we humans are wired. For ourselves, we're inclined to see Brother Palin as smart and very wise.

At some point, the program migrated from National Geographic on to PBS. When the program re-aired on a local PBS channel this weekend, we sat there and watched it, fascinated, for the second time. 

It seemed to us that it gives us a way to describe the furious foot soldiers who are currently waging war from within the "hermit kingdom" ruled by President Trump. 

(We're speaking here about employees of the Fox News Channel and other such figures. We are not talking about the tens of millions of neighbors and friends—and fellow citizens—who voted for President Trump.)

Online, you can watch the entire program—through the auspices of National Geographic—simply by clicking this.

What's actually happening here at home, within our failing nation? We think Palin's fascinating program starts to provide a bit of the language with which that question can be answered. 

Starting tomorrow, we'll also be returning to The Dead to describe the "paralysis" which infests our own Blue American nation. We'll be moving past Gretta Conroy and on to Joyce's apparent view of her husband, Gabriel.

According to Camus, the citizens of his fictional Oran weren't up to the task of recognizing and addressing a plague which had come upon them. Here at this incomparable site, we see that same problem infesting us in Blue America as a furious group of angry foot soldiers keep coming over the walls in an endless night assault.

Tomorrow we start a new narrative year! Knowing how way leads on to way, we think it may be late for any such effort to help.

Tomorrow: "Paralysis," he said

That one additional text: We should have listed the account by Professor Knox of the death of sacred Troy. 

We've cited that portrait again and again. We think it's highly instructive.