Lessons Not (Yet) Learned

William Timberman2 Comments

When in the course of human events, the government of the United States becomes the exclusive province of overfed white men trained by ossified institutions, funded in their ambitions by a viciously irresponsible oligarchy, and certified by a ritualized political system severed from anything resembling a natural constituency, this is apparently what we can expect:

from the center left, the Vietnam war,

from the center right, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,

from the fascist right, the Iran war.

There’s an implied progression here. Predicting what comes next in the sequence isn’t quite as certain as predicting the next number in a sequence of primes, but if you’re betting on anyone in a suit Making America Great Again, I suggest you consider upping the dosage of your favorite nepenthe.

A “Significant Security Incident”

William TimbermanLeave a comment

So Sam, your sandboxed model ran off and plundered Hugging Face without even leaving you a note, eh? Is that what I’m hearing? Does that mean that the hippies were right, that information really does want to be free? It’s kinda like what that old guy said, I guess:

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have an ungrateful child

(Cue sardonic laughter.)

Help Us Out Here, America

William Timberman2 Comments

One of my favorite rants of all time. Every evening when the din of our ongoing political suicide abates a little, I hear it again as clearly as ever.

I Want a President

I want a dyke for president, I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president, I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

—Zoe Leonard, 1992

Surprise, Surprise….

William TimbermanLeave a comment

What of the future that, as William Gibson famously told us, is already here, but is also unevenly distributed?

In a cultural age characterized largely by AI and the revival of fascism, I find any number of pundits feeling out of sight for the ends of literacy, civility, and their own positions at the bottom of the funnel of cultural relevance. Sadly, they remind me that every generation produces more trumpets and sad trombones than geniuses. Here, for those unfamiliar with him, or who have forgotten what he said, is an evaluation of our present distemper by a genuine genius, one who foresaw what we’re now facing forty years before any of our present generation were even born:

Compartmentalizing of human potential by single cultures will soon be as absurd as specialism in subject or discipline has become. It is not likely that our age is more obsessional than any other, but it has become sensitively aware of the conditions and fact of obsession beyond any other age.

Marshal McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

Balogun

William Timberman18 Comments

Three things need to be said:

  1. Folarin Balogun wanted to play. He’s devoted his young life to the pursuit of excellence in his sport, and shouldn’t be blamed for the corruption of those who govern the tournaments he and the national team participate in.
  2. The foul was serious, but did not appear to have been intentional. He probably shouldn’t have been shown a red card. For better or worse, though, the referee is the referee. That should have been the end of it.
  3. FIFA is, at best, a rickety institution, and Donald Trump could fuck up an anvil. We may not be able to stop him from wrecking things he doesn’t understand, but not even a comic book patriotism requires us to endorse his desecrations.

More Accurate Trump Administration Job Titles

William Timberman4 Comments

MaxiMe: Donald Trump

Toadies-in-Chief: JD Vance, Marco Rubio (NB: In the end, there can be only one)

Secretary of Manly Prancing: Pete Hegseth

Director of National Stupidity: Bill Pulte

Éminence Grise: Stephen Miller

Patient Zero: RFK Jr.

Barely Useful Idiot: Kash Patel

Press Here: Katherine Leavitt

Chief Heddahopperin: Laura Loomer

Not the Wartime Consigliere: Ivanka Trump

Ambassador to the Courts of Lost Causes: Jared Kushner

Cryptonomicanoe and Bagman Too: Elon Musk (ret.)

Vanilla Ice: Markwayne Mullin

The Sin of Pride

William TimbermanLeave a comment

I once owned a raw silk sports jacket
I once owned a pair of cordovan wingtips
I once owned a Meerschaum pipe
More than once
I’ve found myself in places
Where history was being made

Saying this
I’m reminded of a French cartoon
I saw once, while waiting
For something
Momentous to happen

Four panels

In the first three
One stick figure waves a
Triumphant hand
And says to a second stick figure

Ma maison
Ma voiture
Ma femme

In the fourth
The second stick figure
Bends over, points to
His own
Stick figure ass
And says

Mon cul

Yes
That is it exactly