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.

SATURDAY: We show you again what the poor fellow said!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30, 2025

We advise you to pity the child: This morning, we want to show you, once again, what the "poor fellow" said. 

Before we do, we'll offer five words:

Temecula Valley Unified School District

You'll hear about it soon enough. For today, we'll only say this—this story helps explain why the messengers on the Fox News Channel can never be totally wrong.

(For the Snopes fact-check on the matter at hand, you can just click here.)

Also this:

With Labor Day approaching, last night was an evening of substitute hosts on the Fox News Channel. This helped produce an evening of astonishing claims, many of which (though not all) had been captured at Mediaite by the time we arose this morning.

We'll try to list the astonishments on Monday, before we start the new narrative year on Tuesday, September 2. For now, we'll only say this:

The Achaeans are coming over the walls again. Sacred Troy met its death in the original iteration.

With that, we move to today's main point. 

We want to show you, once again, what the "poor fellow" said. We refer to the furious Greg Gutfeld, spilling with rage about who the monsters turn out to be and about what the monsters do.

We think it's important to see what he said. On Thursday, viewers of The Five had learned these things about the monsters, but also about who the A-holes and assholes are, by 5:04 p.m.—2:04 out on the coast.

For additional context, see yesterday's report. Accepting a throw from the inexcusable Dana Perino, the furious fellow spilled with this:

GUTFELD (8/28/25): This is why none of these A-holes can lecture anyone on compassion. 

The most compassionate people on the planet are trying to stop the trans delusion. The least compassionate are the people in the media, academia and politicians who enable this hysteria of horror. 

What is so glaring about the trans cult—apparently, your identity is the only thing that matters until you do something awful. Then it's the least important variable. Then you look at everything else. You talk about guns. But suddenly, it is like all of a sudden we can't talk about that—what was it? The other trans shooter that hid her identity. 

In this manifesto that this creep wrote, he said he was tired of being trans, and that he wished he had never brainwashed himself. What more do you need, straight from the monster's mouth?

Politicians, activists and teachers—you built this! You could have listened to the warnings. We were talking about this on this show for years. You amplify the hysterical—a hysterical, literally hysterical phenomenon that was going no place good.  

You created a poisonous program that twisted young minds for destruction, a nihilistic place to be when you deny biology and they have nowhere to go. So all of these media arguments, what you are seeing there among those people, it is to escape their own culpability and the reality they created. 

So forget the layer of mental illness and gun control. The origin of the evil, the evil lies in the creation of a mindset that indulged a delusional self, ruining connections with fellow human beings 

So that trans, by ascribing extreme aggrieved mentality, then gets directed against society. So this person feels justified in killing children. His killing resulted from that ideology. And if you don't believe that, you're one dumb asshole. 

Excuse me.

We regard that as ugly, stupid, murderous, strange. Did we mention the fact that the Achaeans, once again, are coming over the walls?

With respect to Gutfeld himself, we advise you to pity the child. 

His Serra High sits one mile down the Alameda—down the Alameda de las Pulgas—from "our dear Aragon, stately and serene." (We're quoting what the school song said on the day the school opened.)

On the one hand, it's sad to think that such a poisonous mentality could have emerged from such a sunny land. On the other hand, we've read snippets and clips in which Gutfeld describes certain aspects of his experience, both as a high school student and then in later life. 

On that basis, we advise you to pity the child. We also advise you to wonder why Blue America's major elites are prepared to avert their gaze from the poisonous behavior of the adult—of his corporate channel's $9 million man.

With apologies, we think you should read, and contemplate, what the furious fellow said. We regard it as ugly and poisonous and horribly stupid, but massive death and destruction occurred the first time these angry Achaeans breeched those towering walls.

One last point:

On yesterday's edition of The Five, this angry fellow put the pathetic practice on display again.

We refer to the practice known as Tarlov Interruptus. You see, Master Gutfeld does a very poor job regulating his anger and his vast sense of grievance.

The nation's most-watched "cable news" program starts as four against one. Before long, one or several of the furious four start interrupting and overtalking as they shut down the one.

That's what "fair and balanced" has come to mean on this corporate messaging channel. Yesterday, the interruption of demon Tarlov started at 5:08 p.m.—2:08 out on the coast.

You can see the fellow doing that here. The four get to speak in polite, perfect silence. By the antique rules of the prehuman game, the one has to be shut down.

Also this: What's the correct definition of love? As the culture is being torn down, David Brooks thinks he may have the answer! 

(As we noted yesterday, we've long admired his work.)

THE DUEL: "Typical chick," the cable star said!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2025

Before that, he gave us our monsters: The new column by David Brooks appears beneath a touchy-feely headline. 

Brooks has become our new whipping-person at this vaunted site. His column appears in today's print editions, and it begins like this:

The Wrong Definition of Love

The time I used to spend on Twitter I now spend on Substack, and my life is much better for it. There are a lot of interesting, eclectic writers in the world. This week, for example, I stumbled across a post from Antonia Bentel, who asked six strangers and friends about how they fall in love.

One woman responded, “I fall in love when someone sees me in a way I didn’t know I could be seen.” A young man answered, “Falling in love is like seeing yourself reflected in someone else’s mind.” Another woman said, “I fall in love when I don’t feel like I’m performing competence.” She added that love happens “when someone sees you in the absolute mess of it—your pain, your pettiness, your unpaid parking tickets.” Another man replied, “Falling in love is like entering a room you didn’t know existed in your own house.”

Bentel makes it clear that this is far from a scientific survey, but what struck me about these answers is that they all had a common definition of love—that love blooms when somebody else makes you feel understood and good about yourself.

That's how the column starts.

We have a lot of respect for the work Brooks has down in the years since he switched his focus, moving away from standard politics and toward an attempt to clarify values.  In the current column, he ends up saying that Antonia Bentel's recent work involves "the wrong definition of love."

"Given the wickedness of the time" (Plato), it seems to us that a column like this may involve the wrong idea of appropriate journalistic inquiry. It seems to us that a ship is sinking, and that people like Brooks are up on the deck as the band plays on.

It seems to us that Brooks is hiding. Consider what happened yesterday on the Fox News Channel "cable news" program known as The Five.

The Five is the most-watched program in American news. Yesterday, a makeshift panel had been assembled as the Labor Day weekend approached:

The Five: Thursday, August 28, 2025
Trey Gowdy: host, Sunday Night in America
Jessica Tarlov: rotating co-host, The Five
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor
Dana Perino: co-host, The Five
Greg Gutfeld: co-host, The Five

Two or three regulars were on hand, depending on how you were counting. Gowdy sat in the Judge Jeannine chair, which remains unfilled on a permanent basis. Seemingly as a mercy, Jones was sitting in the Jesse Watters chair.

There they sat, arrayed in the standard fair-and-balanced format, in which four pro-MAGA panelists will gang up on the one Democrat. And let the word go forth to the nations:

The correct definition of love would not be on the docket this day! Meanwhile, did we mention a salient fact?

This is the most-watched program in the American "cable news" firmament. Here are the relevant viewership numbers from Monday, August 18:

Total viewers: Monday, August 18, 2025
The Five: 3.85 million
The Rachel Maddow Show: 2.01 million
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell: 1.46 million
Deadline: White House: 1.15 million
The Beat with Ari Melber: 1.04 million
The Arena with Kasie Hunt: 695,000

Rachel Maddow still puts up a fight on a Monday-only basis. Other than that, The Five basically triples the score on the most-watched MSNBC programs. On that particular day, it more than quintupled the score on CNN's most watched program.

Also this: On that same evening, Jesse Watters Primetime and the Gutefld! show each attracted more than three million viewers. The Fox News Channel is basically lapping the field.

For better or worse, The Five is powerful "cable news" medicine! It also represents an assault on the very possibility of maintaining an American discourse or a modern American nation, definitions of love to the side.

We can't begin to cover all of what happened on this degraded program last night. For starters, let's turn to co-host Greg Gutfeld, the first person called upon to discuss, or to pretend to discuss, the program's initial topic.

Cast in her role as the program's den mother, Dana Perino had introduced the topic. She played the standard, extremely brief bits of videotape, allegedly from "the media who think that prayer in this moment is useless."

"This moment" was Wednesday morning's mass shooting in Minneapolis. Perino had also played videotape of Jacob Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, saying this:

"Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity. We should not be operating out of a place of hatred of anyone. We should be operating out of a place of love for our kids."

There would be no discussion this day of why Frey might have said that. But now, Perino threw to the endlessly furious Gutfeld—and when she did, the endlessly furious jack-a-napes angrily traveled a rather dark road.

To watch the videotape, you can just click this:

GUTFELD (8/28/25): This is why none of these A-holes can lecture anyone on compassion. 

The most compassionate people on the planet are trying to stop the trans delusion. The least compassionate are the people in the media, academia and politicians who enable this hysteria of horror. 

What is so glaring about the trans cult—apparently, your identity is the only thing that matters until you do something awful. Then it's the least important variable. Then you look at everything else. You talk about guns. But suddenly, it is like all of a sudden we can't talk about that—what was it? The other trans shooter that hid her identity. 

In this manifesto that this creep wrote, he said he was tired of being trans, and that he wished he had never brainwashed himself. What more do you need, straight from the monster's mouth?

Politicians, activists and teachers—you built this! You could have listened to the warnings. We were talking about this on this show for years. You amplify the hysterical—a hysterical, literally hysterical phenomenon that was going no place good.  

You created a poisonous program that twisted young minds for destruction, a nihilistic place to be when you deny biology and they have nowhere to go. So all of these media arguments, what you are seeing there among those people, it is to escape their own culpability and the reality they created. 

So forget the layer of mental illness and gun control. The origin of the evil, the evil lies in the creation of a mindset that indulged a delusional self, ruining connections with fellow human beings 

So that trans, by ascribing extreme aggrieved mentality, then gets directed against society. So this person feels justified in killing children. His killing resulted from that ideology. And if you don't believe that, you're one dumb asshole. 

Excuse me.

We did our best to transcribe that angry presentation. Some of it was a bit hard to follow.

At any rate, it was now 5:04 p.m. Eastern, 2:04 out on the coast. Millions of viewers had already been told that "none of these A-holes can lecture us any more." 

They had also heard that, if you don't agree with this furious man, that means that "you're one dumb asshole." You're a dumb asshole too!

"Excuse me," he then thoughtfully said. So it went in the first four minutes of this failing nation's most-watched cable "news" program as the holiday weekend approached.

Perino didn't bat an eye. Instead, the den mother simply threw to Gowdy, placidly saying this:

PERINO (continuing directly): Trey Gowdy, great to have you on the show...

These A-holes can't lecture us any more, the furious Gutfeld had said. Also, If you don't agree with my presentation, that makes you one dumb asshole!

Amazingly, the presentation by Johnny Joey Jones during this segment may have been just as striking as Gutfeld's overwrought rant. Below, we'll show you the way Gutfeld ended the second segment of yesterday's show—a segment during which he staged the latest serial interruption of Tarlov as she tried to make a perfectly sensible point.

We don't have the strength today to try to present a full critique of Gutfeld's angry presentation about the poisonous, nihilistic and evil "trans cult." We'll only say that the phenomenon which we now call "transgender" has been visible around the globe, within the world' many cultures, since roughly the dawn of time.

In that sense, he seems to be part of the "biology" that Gutfeld's God created. It wasn't invented by Gutfeld's teachers at Serra High, or by the politicians for whom he doesn't vote.

It wasn't invented by the liberal and Democratic women he constantly compares to horses, cows, pigs and whales on his own demented 10 p.m. "cable news" program. Also, we'd recommend this obvious fact to this overwrought fellow:

The vast majority of mass shootings are committed by people who are what is now sometimes called "cisgender!" Gowdy himself had noted this obvious fact on Wednesday afternoon's Outnumbered program, triggering fury through parts of the Fox News world.

With respect to yesterday's show, we blame Perino more than Gutfeld. Transparently, he seems to be crazy; she isn't. Presumably, she's there for the money—and the money is large.

She has long accepted the den mother role on this astonishing program. She's been assigned the task of creating the debatable impression that the pro-MAGA panelists on the program aren't all out of their minds.

That said, the longing to create an entire class of "monsters" and "creeps"—an entire class to demonize—seems to be deeply bred in the bone. 

In the 1950s, Tailgunner Joe sought the Communists out. Today, Gutfeld demonizes those who belong to the "trans cult"—but so does the New York Post, whose front=page headline on Thursday morning pathetically said this:

DEMONIC
Transgender maniac shoots up Catholic school morning Mass, killing two kids

To see that front page, just click here. You'll never seen a headline like this from this Murdoch newspaper in one of the far more numerous cases:

DEMONIC
Yet another straight white male shoots up [insert rest of headline]

You'll never see a headline like that—nor should you, of course. But again and again, the Murdoch empire takes us back to Salem Village, and people like Gutfeld are prepared to cast themselves in the leadership role.

Jones' presentation in that first segment may have been even more startling than Gutfeld's. The second segment of yesterday's program dealt with a different topic—in this case, with a pseudo-topic. One of the chyrons beneath the clowning said this:

NEWSOM GOES ON DERANGED ANTI-TRUMP RANT

In all honesty, Newsom hadn't gone on a deranged anti-Trump rant. But if you click the link and continue to click, you can see a common phenomenon on this program—you can see the practice by which Tarlov is aggressively overtalked and interrupted as she attempts to state her point.

Yesterday, it was Gutfeld performing this corporate service as the permissive den mother looked on. The segment ended with Gutfeld derisively saying this about Tarlov, scoring the segment's last word:

GUTFELD: Typical chick!

For the record, Tarlov is smarter than Gutfeld is. What a disordered man!

Greg Gutfeld is 60 years old! But so it goes on this demonic "cable news" channel. As it does, David Brooks is typing away on a mountaintop, writing about the correct way to try to be loved.

David, listen up! The American nation, such as it ever has been, is now being eaten alive. When are you going to put the Fox News Channel on and tell readers what you've seen?

What we saw yesterday at 5 p.m. was a furious "revolt from below."  We've called it "the revolt of the D-minus students," but it's only one part of the current ongoing duel. 

It's enabled by "the haplessness of the elites"—by the silence of David Brooks, by the silence of so many others.

They won't search for the truth about President Trump. They won't mention The Five at all.