Prickly City by Scott Stantis for March 29, 2021

I am too, Carmen .It has been this way before and it will be again. I am on my 15th President . Do like I do and tough it out. They can kill you but they can’t eat you. So do like I do, just tough it out. Absent Friends

Maybe go grocery shopping.

Or a massage.

Or go to church.

Or maybe take some classes.

etc.

I repeated myself.Sorry about that Absent Friends

I’d be glad if you stopped voting for vile republicans.

Cicadas

Admittedly reaching for relevance for sarge’s sake… maybe the biggest part of gun deaths is the guy who decides he’s not glad he’s not dead, and has a gun handy.

VIOLENCE, DISEASE, WAP, PANDEMIC

“I’ve run the gamut, A to Z / Three cheers and dammit, C’est la vie / I got through all of last year, and I’m here / Lord knows, at least I was there, and I’m here / Look who’s here, I’m still here.” Thanks and apologies to Stephen Sondheim’s Follies (1971).

Stand in one spot long enough, Carmen. You’re a black female Arizonan. Any questions?

She still doesn’t notice where these things are all coming from. They’re just crazy, random acts of nature, I guess, with no roots or origins of any kind.

…like Winslow.

Yesterday I read the graphic novel version of Yellow Submarine, where the scenery has giant words of LOVE and YES and KNOW and similar. Quite the difference from today’s strip.

Last week there was a remarkable piece entitled “‘Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough” published in The American Mind, a publication put out by the Claremont Institute. This piece is not a product of the neo-Nazi netherworld . . . Claremont has been at the forefront of attempting to give intellectual cachet and respectability to Trumpism

Next, lets address the immediate, opening conceit of the piece, “that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term”:

I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else

.… the author has radically divided the American polity into a “true America” and one made up of a kind of second-class citizen, which is not really a part of the national body, but an interloper, a constant alien presence undermining the national project. Usually in the history of fascist rhetoric, that role is given to a minority … The author gives the role of “true Americans” to the “75 million people” who voted for Trump. This paradoxical fusion of, and alternation between, elitism and populism is a fixture of fascist politics …

https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-week-in-fascism

I don’t know who John Ganz is, but this is a very good essay on American (proto?)Fascism. Long, comprehensive and worth the time.