This week we were told Donald Trump has a bigger button than Kim Jong-un. Nobody wanted to hear that. I spent the whole week with my hands on my ears singing “lalalalala” to drown out all the big-button talk.
As I was getting used to the idea that 2018 would be all about which crazy man has the bigger big red button, Steve Bannon stepped in. I don’t know what’s going on between him and Trump, but it sounds like they’re getting a divorce. Our two daddies hate each other so much they’re telling the truth about each other, to maximize the hurt. It’s our fault.
USA Today columnist Michael Wolff wrote a book saying Bannon described a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in 2016 as treasonous and unpatriotic, which sounds like the truest words Bannon may have ever spoken. Trump calls the book all lies, which presumably would imply that Bannon did not make that accusation, since “all” means “all.” But then he attacks Bannon, whom he calls “Sloppy Steve,” and says “watch what happens to” the two of them, Wolff and Bannon both. I pray for the love of mercy and all that is decent he doesn’t show either of them his gigantic button.
Speaking of the love of mercy, can we all just agree that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is tetched in the head, too? (In addition to Kim Jong-un, Trump, Bannon, Ben Carson, to name a few.)
I mean, he can’t be high on weed; that would just be too hypocritical even for him. It’s got to be that he really does think the war on drugs regarding marijuana is a bright idea, just as the whole rest of the country is coming to its senses and finally knowing that it never was.
It has been suggested by some that Sessions likes the war on drugs, including the war on marijuana, because it has proven to be an effective means to oppress racial minorities when used in conjunction with a systematic discrimination against minorities in the application of penalties.
To approve the drug war because it leads to racially disparate incarceration is like approving highway speed limits of 100 miles per hour because it kills more people. Racially disparate incarceration is a stupid, ignorant, bone-headed thing to want. You have to be tetched to want that.
If Sessions doesn’t approve the war against marijuana for that reason, then he must have some other reason. For instance, the reason he gave, to the effect that federal law prohibits marijuana trafficking. But the Obama rules regarding federal enforcement are very clear in spelling out how it is possible for states to exercise their state’s rights to regulate intrastate commerce without interfering with the federal government’s interest in maintaining interstate regulation of marijuana commerce. So clear that the only conclusion I can come to is that Sessions just hates the Obama rules because he didn’t get to sign them.
So he’s tetched. In the head. No matter how you look at it.
Exercises on tetchedness and big buttons:
Trump says that because of the winter cold the country is going through, we would benefit from more global warming. Thousands of climate scientists hearing that turned purple, veins popped out from their foreheads, and hundreds nearly passed out from severe apoplexy. Do you think Trump knows what seasons are, that the Earth’s axis is tilted, and that there is a “southern hemisphere”? Or is he just messing with all those scientists’ heads? Present your answer in the form of an apocalyptic nightmare, so that you’ll have at least one apocalyptic nightmare to call your own as a result of all this nonsense. (I’ve had one of my own since the Reagan administration.)
Here are some thoughts for discussion. Does the size of one’s big red button really matter? Isn’t it all about how you use it? And isn’t that what we’re all afraid of, namely, how either of these two lunatics would use their big red buttons? What the heck, why don’t you answer all these questions in the form of another completely different apocalyptic nightmare?
Look at you now, two apocalyptic nightmares all your own and you’re still here!
One final task. Compare and contrast global warming and nuclear winter. No fair peeking at your neighbor’s apocalypses.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd.
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