Democrats continue to amaze me. These folks are going to attend Trump’s speech — sit politely and listen to his mad imbecile blather — but they’re going to wear white. Oh man, that’s showing him, innit?

Maxine Waters, to her credit, is planning to stay home, which really seems like a no-brainer. My jaw has fallen through several floors and I need to go find it down in the basement laundry room. What in God’s name are these other fools thinking of?

I can only conjecture that the ethos of ‘splitting the difference’ — successively, a la Achilles and the tortoise — has become such an ingrained tropism that they just can’t help themselves. No potential bridges will be burnt, but a Masonic in-group statement will be delivered. The base will no doubt be happy. They don’t, after all, expect much.

In its way, it’s a juicy business, this recent smoke-free-room anointment of the latest DNC chair — the awful Perez over the perhaps slightly less awful Ellison. But who cares, really. With any luck at all, the poor Clintonite mook Perez will be the official chief mourner, a year or two hence, at the damp, depressing, poorly-attended graveside of the Democratic Party, finally buried, after two lamentable centuries and change, with an unnecessary stake through its heart(*).

Juicy because it’s so strikingly the fabled old ward-heeler world: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours; what has he done for me lately; show me the money. People playing the angles inside a rapidly collapsing figure. The tangents and the cosines are objects of serious nerdly study; the measurable length of the sides is of no consequence. We shall fight each other to the death for ever-diminishing prizes. “Rats in a trap” is an awful cliche, of course, but it comes irresistibly to mind.

One of of the truly delightful aspects of the thing was how irrelevant my town’s mayor, the sorry faineant Bill DeBlasio, was, even in the tiny, hypoxic, gravitational-collapse world of Democratic party insider politics. It’s difficult to overstate what a big nothing this guy has been, here in Gotham. I mean, he’s useless even by the low standards of the Democratic Party. I curse him daily: filling potholes is a mayor’s first job — it’s in the Constitution, I think — and the condition of the streets, which I see up close on the bike, makes me miss Iron Mike Bloomberg. Never thought I would say that, but Windbag Bill is a miracle worker in this respect.

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(*) Still, as regards the stake: You can’t be too careful with these Undead. I’m in favor of the stake. If only for the sheer joy of the thing: the thwack of the hammer, the crusty give of the ancient skin, the slowly-welling thick old dark blood, sucked and reduced over long ages.

… it’s more or less business as usual, except a bit more so. But it’s been more so, year after every year, for a long time. Cops are still beating people up, when they’re not shooting them, and our great Republic is still dropping bombs on people, directly or by proxy, in the Middle East. Guantanamo is still open for business. Bibi Netanyahu is still welcome in Washington. The jails are still full, and harmless people, seeking only to get a job and raise their kids, are still being deported. Dog bites man. It’s the American way of life.

Polite hypocrisy has certainly taken a drubbing, and various poltergeists and pookas are strutting their stuff more boldly than they used to do — or are they just being reported on more than they used to be? This is always a question. We know they were always there. Are there more of them? Are they bolder? My guess is ‘no’ to the first question, and a tepid dubious ‘maybe’ to the second. But it’s a matter of the second or third decimal place. No landslide has occurred.

— No. On second thought, that’s not exactly true. There has been one very spectacular phenomenon: the complete collapse of American liberalism. Liberals have gone visibly, obviously, staringly batshit crazy. I suppose they thought this wasn’t supposed to happen — as if any fool couldn’t have seen it coming for what, the past forty years? But all their fond certainties about progress and so on have turned to ash, and they are thrashing about like landed trout, indulging in tinfoil-hat conspiratism about the evil Russians, embracing the CIA with tears of joy, and proclaiming the corporate media as unsullied springs of Gospel truth.

Perhaps it’s a case of the latent physiognomy becoming patent; but if that’s so, then keeping the pasteboard mask of rationality in place at least called for a certain exercise of the instrumental intellect, as understood by the high-school debate team, and that’s all gone now. The result is that people who were once intelligent, up to a point, or seemed so, have become downright visibly stupid, and hysterical and incoherent with it. I suppose a shrink would call it ‘decompensation’.

I know people — reasonable people, good companions, skilled in their metiers, and as well-schooled as anybody now is — who are encouraging me to call some rat in Congress to keep Steve Bannon off the National Security Council. The National Security Council! God almighty. After Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, inter alios, what virtue does that infamous body have to lose? Does anybody even know when the NSC got its start? Or why?

No doubt Bannon could end up being worse than the monsters who preceded him, though it’s a high bar. There’s an old joke about how it could always be worse, and there’s no limit to human depravity — turds all the way down, to paraphrase Arthur Eddington’s dear old lady. But even so, he’s just continuing the long-obvious trend. There’s progress for you. The torch has been passed.