If, in some fantastical way, you were able to visit the moon, what would you find?
Obviously, you’d witness the vast cold lunar landscape, all muted rocky planes and valleys of pockmarked gray dust under a vast black canopy of distant stars – and one familiar blue Earth in the middle distance.
A closer examination of the moon’s surface would reveal evidence of humanity’s six brief visits more than fifty years ago: Three abandoned cars, bags of literal shit, a Bible, several flags, a family snapshot, several hundred thousand pounds of metal junk, a camera, footprints everywhere, and some golf balls.
Yes, Americans dirtied up the fucking moon. Of course we did. Our grandest accomplishments always come with a gnarly downside. I understand the technological and biological necessity of it, but we literally shit and pissed on the moon. How fitting.
Today, we’ve abandoned any pretense of grand accomplishments and instead opt for increasingly sophisticated and cruel weapons, police state surveillance technology, and job-killing artificial intelligence slop that relies on plagiarism and IP theft while burning our failing environment in return for wrong information.
We’re shitting and pissing in our own nests.
Beyond that, we’ve betrayed what made our very existence as a nation itself such a grand accomplishment, at least in theory. All those elegant un-fulfilled promises about freedom and equality made in our founding documents? Trump and MAGA have wiped their asses with them as they try to roll America back to the antebellum South.
Our Constitution has been abandoned thanks to a mob of very stupid, very greedy, very bad people. They value power and profit over all else and wrap themselves in the flag and Christianity and our founding myths to achieve their project goals.
Most Americans do not yet realize, and maybe never will, that we’re a monstrous fraud and the world increasingly sees America as a collapsing state that’s settling into tacky, sadistic fascism led by genuine sleazy dipshits. We’re the biggest disappointment in human history. We’ve squandered our righteous potential on ugly, stupid bullshit and cruelty and hate and greed.
It’s all so perverse. Demoralizing. Enraging.
Just this week, yesterday alone, we saw the president of the United States and some of his imperial clown retinue yukking it up at a concentration camp hastily built on an airstrip in the Florida everglades.
These are moral perverts.
This morning, the New York Times published a story on how to avoid the measles while traveling. The fucking measles. In 2025, not 1925. That this is necessary journalism is 2025 is evidence of what an obscene, degenerate society America has become thanks to Republicans and their collaborationists. This is a dark, vile era of ignorance, cruelty, and madness. We reject science and medicine in favor of Dark Ages quackery from fraudsters and dunces.
Thanks to a Congress stuffed with Vichyites and cowards, Trump is going to get his grotesque and murderous budget bill, which is a Trojan Horse bursting with terrible policy and tax increases on the poor and funding cuts to critical programs so that Republicans can float extended tax cuts for the ruling class.
Trump & Co. have publicly made it very clear that they do not give a fuck if you die painfully and in squalor, if you’re old or sickly or young or a veteran, because tax cuts for the wealthiest people in history are the regime’s priority, along with creation of its personal militia.
The spending bill includes $160 billion for ICE, which is more than will be spent on the U.S. Marine Corps. Why? To make the agency into the nation’s largest jailer and to expand its ranks by 10,000 agents that will provide Trump with a personal loyalist paramilitary force of masked gunmen that he can wield against his domestic enemies and conduct his white nationalist purges.
He spoke on Tuesday of potentially deporting Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani, which is why it’s all the more terrible he’s getting his own combination Confederate Gestapo-Schutzstaffel. No one is safe.
Naturally, Trump isn’t content to simply denaturalize and exile a couple of high-profile domestic enemies. No, his fascism is much more totalitarian. He wants to kidnap and deport native-born American citizens he dislikes, considers subhuman, or are merely inconvenient to his ambitions. That means you or I, our families, friends, coworkers, neighbors, etc. Everyone is at risk under his authoritarian regime that has abandoned due process and ignores the courts.
If you’re not deported, you may just end up in a swamp gulag and eaten by alligators. Which is not an exaggeration.
That’s the president of the United States casually saying he thinks it’s a fine idea if fucking alligators eat people at his newest concentration camp, a facility that Florida Republicans are selling merchandise to promote.
Trump is a rapist, multiple felon, and grifter but mainly a lazy sadistic degenerate who has lost all credibility and all moral authority to remain in his role. Imagine the apoplectic orgasmic fit Fox News would experience for weeks or months if Barack Obama waxed about his idle fantasy of alligators eating domestic political prisoners.
When the deeply racist and bigoted president is openly musing about jailing his enemies and feeding them to vicious swamp creatures, does it feel like you’re living in a functioning democracy? Is anyone with a conscience and empathy and compassion still having fun in America?
Of course, the various lesser satellites in the MAGA Cinematic Universe are now feverishly jockeying for attention on their own dehumanizing promises of brutality and malice. And others are simply promising to collaborate with Trump no matter how harmful, unpopular, and insane his demands are.
We’re ruled by sadistic landlords that are also boring in their fascist, arrogant cruelty. Per Merriam-Webster, a kakistocracy (kak·is·toc·ra·cy, kakə̇ˈstäkrəsē) is a noun defined as “government by the worst people.” The dictionary also defines the noun kleptocracy (klep·toc·ra·cy) as “government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.” And then plutocracy is simply government by the wealthy. All three are apt. All three are perverse.
Let’s nor forget that Trump and Musk are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands globally after gutting aid programs for the vulnerable and sick. And it’s now predicted their cuts will kill up to 14 million people in coming years.
Will no one rid us of these turbulent, debauched priests?
How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?
Is the democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or, would we all be happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked out, to hell with it. — Hunter S. Thompson, January 1974
I try to remind myself that in life, nothing lasts. The good, the bad, the indifferent … nothing endures. This will pass. Trump will die. His contemptible regressive political movement will eat itself alive as the scheming court jesters and baleful eunuchs scramble for a throne they can never fill. Younger voters will reject the sadism, as they just did in New York City.
Now, some less ugly news and developments …
“Poets are not intended to taste fame, they generally malfunction.”
That’s a great line from a wonderful essay about the Sylvia Plath Industrial Complex from the brilliant Patricia Lockwood, published this week in the London Review of Books. I think you get one freebie article a month, and I recommend spending it on this piece. Or just subscribe and read her other LRB articles. They’re worth it. Lockwood is a unique, witty, clever, insightful voice.
The Paris Review did finally get around to reviewing Paris.
Jimmy Swaggart is dead. Finally. I grew up in the 1980s, the peak era for the horny televangelist movement that presaged the moral and ethical perversions of the Tea Party and MAGA, which cloaked themselves in a grifter form of Christianity that Christ wouldn’t recognize but certainly would drop-kick from the temple. You can trace a blood-soaked line directly from Swaggart to Trump. I almost wish hell was real so they could burn together for eternity.
That said, Swaggart and his ilk did inspire Bloom County’s “Fundamentally Oral Bill” storyline in 1987.
The WNBA will expand in coming years to Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Hooray! I enjoyed women’s basketball and began my college journalism career covering women’s sports at Wright State University. Cleveland and Detroit are getting teams for the second time, while Philly is new to The W. While I am resigned to the Cleveland team being another hometown franchise that will break my heart, I absolutely will be in the stands at Little Caesars Arena to watch them hopefully beat Detroit. I hope both teams use their former names, the Rockers and the Shock.
The Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham was in the news after the expansion announcement for dogging on Detroit and Cleveland as expansion markets, saying that people aren’t likely to be excited to visit those two Rustbelt cities. Jemele Hill responded on Twitter: “Sis, you play in Indiana. No disrespect.”
In case you missed it, Forbes recently published its estimates on how much WNBA franchises are worth. The numbers might surprise you. People want to buy into The W, and it’s driving up team values. Which is a good thing.
Neuromancer is finally becoming a movie! It’s in production for Apple TV Plus! Which I’ll need to subscribe to! If you’ve not read the novel, it’s worth your time. It’s the ur-text of the cyberpunk genre. I’m not a huge consumer of sci-fi books, but this is one that crossed into the mainstream. No release date yet.
Also on my list of upcoming movies that have me excited:
Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues (Sept. 12)
Nobody 2 (Aug. 15)
Waltzing With Brando (Sept. 19)
-30-
Unpaid Bills 
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