With Apologies To Mr Truman

Sarah Cooper - on psychological warfare:

“But reporters were clapping and laughing, they loved it.”  — a commenter defending Trump’s first press conference.

“But members of the CIA were clearly laughing at his jokes and clapping, so what he was saying couldn’t have been inappropriate.”  — CNN pundit defending Trump’s CIA speech where he talked about his war with the media, in front of a memorial to men and women who lost their lives in actual wars.

The clapping and laughing you hear in both instances are Trump’s own people. They are sycophants who he brings to cheer him on and make it seem like what he’s saying is being well-received. And it’s working.

The laugh track was invented to cue the audience to the jokes and encourage laughter in response. But it has another effect: if you hear people laughing and you’re not, you start to question if maybe there’s something wrong with you for not getting it. You might even impulsively start laughing just to fit in, not because you think anything is funny. In fact that’s how these fluffers work — one person initiates a clap and suddenly everyone thinks there’s something to clap for. And then everyone is clapping. For no reason.

It's business and it's politics. It's the business of politics, and the merging of politics with business, wrapped in the flag and blessed by the church. The result is the institutionalized hyper-corruption-on-steroids called Fascism. In that system especially, if you wanna friend, buy a dog.

I won't be forgiving of willful ignorance. I won't be tolerant of Alternative Facts. I won't be quiet about it.

And while I'll always try not to be deliberately unkind to you, understand that I'll fail in that regard on occasion, because I won't treat you like a child by tiptoeing around your delicate sensibilities.

I'm really not trying to be an asshole about it - it just seems like too many people are trying to make it impossible for me not to be.

So put all of this under "Sorry-Not-Sorry-But".

If you come in here without a helmet,

you might leave with some brain damage.

A Tweet

Don't worry guys, our lawmakers are looking out for us... pic.twitter.com/EefyBOoAuU

— Patt Kelley (@pattkelley) June 13, 2016

The Balls

In 1993, the Clintons attended 14 inaugural balls.

Laura & W went to 8 of 'em in 2001.

And the Obamas had 10 in 2009.

Trump had 2, and they were lightly attended - Trump's 2 itty-bitty sad little balls.

*Is any of this true? Who gives a fuck - this is the Post-Truth World of Alt-Fact.
It's not a question of True vs False. The only thing that matters now is what you choose to believe at any given moment.
And that's how the bad guys get power; and how they stay in power.

Short Toon Dump

The March(es)

In case you were wondering about that accapella thing that happened yesterday in Washington.

Quiet --MILCK

Beating Trump

The guy goes out of his way looking for rakes to step on.

@realDonaldTrump 30m were watching to see if you did a nazi salute or tripped down the stairs

— kristyan benedict (@KreaseChan) January 22, 2017

@realDonaldTrump here are some of my views: pic.twitter.com/tPSEEEQWfc

— #TheResistance (@AynRandPaulRyan) January 22, 2017

@realDonaldTrump who told you to say this? Can they be president?

— Sean Hartofilis (@BeachPillows) January 22, 2017

What A Country

I'm not one for sloppy sentimental patriotism. But I saw this on Facebook today, and something kinda popped in my brain (sometimes I think it may be a stroke when that happens, but anyway...).

The US National Anthem isn't exactly 'the people's song', cuz it can be a real bitch to sing it.  But this is not the joint where we only do the easy shit.  We do the hard things - and we do those hard things by choice.

It's just possible that we're gettin' back to where we're at least willing to do the hard work of democracy again. And if we can do that, the rest will follow.

What You Think Is Real

No, Mr Trump

Climate Change is a real thing

You as POTUS - now there's a hoax

Aziz Ansari

Today's Tweet And GIF

Freedom of expression is an awesome thing.

Internet… thank you pic.twitter.com/EFMys3tQWV

— Layne Theory (@ThisIsLayne) January 21, 2017

At Langley

Now What?

So, Trump's in the Oval Office now, and in that first big official briefing, did everybody roll their eyes when he asked, "So what's the real story on that whole Roswell alien thing, huh?" - like he's the first one who ever came up with that (except he prob'ly wasn't joking).

Second - how disappointed is he that there really is no such thing as The Big Book Of Secrets?

Which brings us to number three - will there be a call to Alex Jones? Like: "Dude, you really are a fuckin' idiot - none of that shit's true."

Yeah - prob'ly not. And the Press Poodles prob'ly won't ask him about any of it either.

Just wonderin'.

Yeehaw And Away We Go

Somebody who's better at this than I am would prob'ly find it fairly easy to run it down and make sure, but I'm thinking this is prob'ly a nice little payoff for somebody in Trump's Krony Klatch.

HuffPo:

With what may have been his first presidential order, Donald Trump made it more expensive for working- and middle-class Americans to buy their first homes. The move will increase costs for 750,000 to 850,000 Americans in the next year alone, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The Obama administration had said last week that the Federal Housing Administration would drop the cost of mortgage insurance it sells by almost a third to 0.60 percent. But after Trump took office, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the FHA, told lenders the fee cut was off. The reversal of the reduction will mean that homebuyers who borrow $200,000 under the program will see their mortgage insurance fees go up by $500 a year relative to what the Obama administration had ordered, according to figures released by the FHA when the cut was announced.

The reduction was intended to help partially offset the cost of rising mortgage rates and was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 27. The government sells the insurance in case borrowers default.

- and -

Julian Castro, Obama’s HUD secretary, said when the fee cut was announced that the FHA’s reserve fund had grown by $44 billion in the last four years and that it was time to share these gains with borrowers. Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to run HUD, said in his confirmation hearing that he supported undoing the fee cut, and lending trade publications reported that a reversal was likely.

Profits for me and costs for thee.

Phony-ass POTUS

I don't know all that much about it, but this body language doesn't exactly scream "Church-Goer" to me.

This is not the posture of somebody who regularly attends church. pic.twitter.com/XSg8PDGprH

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) January 21, 2017

@aravosis

Today's Tweet & GIF

@otepofficial LOL pic.twitter.com/z4YyrUuztV

— Chap (@DeadlyRice8) January 15, 2017

The Haunting

This is the best thing I've seen. #Inauguration pic.twitter.com/91P0OD4SWn

— mariana xx (@trustnorminah) January 20, 2017

Today's Tweet

LMAO! Most empty seats ever‼️

#InauguralBall #Inauguration pic.twitter.com/T3Br6EDWFa

— TheAverageBlackMan™ (@TheAvgBlackMan) January 21, 2017

Not exactly the adoring throngs he was hoping for.

A coupla screen caps from WaPo's live feed:

Where else do we see "presidential parades" where the security forces outnumber the crowd?

This does not bode well.

And y'know, it occurs to me - if almost literally nobody shows up to acknowledge the installation of the POTUS, maybe we only think there's a guy in the office, but we don't really have a president.

My Guy Is Smokin' Hot

...your guy ain't doodly squat

On Hoping It's Not The End

I make a conscious effort not to get too starry-eyed about anybody, but I'm afraid I'll be missing that Obama guy somethin' awful.

Inauguration Day

We always have great hope for a new president.  This is the first time I can remember including the hope that this ass-wipe schmuck doesn't just rob us blind and then set it up to get us all killed to cover his get-away.

не мой президент

Fuck you, Trump

and the horse's ass you rode in on

Boycott

NEW VIDEO: #TheResistanceGQ is officially underway as of noon: BOYCOTT THE INAUGURATION. pic.twitter.com/wbBpMGzNLD

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) January 19, 2017

Fake Lord Have Mercy

Again, Governor - those glasses ain't foolin' nobody.

PERRY: I hope you're as much fun on that dais as you were on your couch.
FRANKEN: Well.
PERRY: May I rephrase that please?
FRANKEN: Please. pic.twitter.com/fiLWD6qTOK

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 19, 2017

hat tip = @kylegriffin1

And how long before we're treated to a headline along the lines of:

Energy Sec'y Perry Announces 

Nuclear Arsenal Maintenance Contract

Awarded To JiffyLube

More Than One Way

At last count, the number of Congress Critters who've said they won't attend the inauguration is pushin' towards 60.

Cummings nails the point when he says it's about the need to defend our institutions, and he's doing it his way while everybody else does it their way.

It sucks that this is where are are now.

It sucks that we're just kinda stuck with this particular battle.

It sucks that, by default, we have to own this bit of history.

It just sucks.

All we can be expected to do is to what we're able to do,

Hoping to be surprised at how able we are.

Embrace the suck

Do what you can do

Stay in the fight

resist

...but take a break once in a while too

Inside Out

I can't keep up. The twists and turns just in this one angle of this one story is enough to overload my circuits - which I think is mostly the point.  And unfortunately, it seems to be working pretty well.

HuffPo:

Two brief quotes from Breitbart’s interview with Prince should suffice:

Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server last week....”[NYPD] found a lot of other really damning criminal information [on Weiner’s computer], including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than twenty times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said. “The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress, was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained. “I believe—I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at One Police Plaza in New York—the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department.”

Virtually all of this is untrue. Prince continued:

“So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything, and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn’t. There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to Special Access Programs....The point being, fortunately, it’s not just the FBI; five different offices are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well....From what I understand, up to the commissioner or at least the chief level in NYPD, they wanted to have a press conference, and DOJ, Washington people, political appointees have been exerting all kinds of undue pressure on them to back down....This kind of evil, this kind of true dirt on Hillary Clinton—look, you don’t have to make any judgments. Just release the emails. Just dump them. Let them out there. Let people see the light of truth.”

Prince’s statements of November 4th—whether given with the knowledge that they were untrue or without any knowledge of their accuracy whatsoever—underscore the sort of disinformation Comey feared would be given to voters, and, more importantly, believed by voters, if he did not complete his investigation into the duplicate emails and announce his findings before Election Day. This alone explains his deviation from FBI protocol prohibiting discussion of open cases (and announcements regarding major investigations within two months of a general election).

While I guess you could make the point that this has happened more than once before, if you're making that argument as a way to shrug it off and rationalize your indifference to it - well, to be as polite and as diplomatic and as non-threatening as I think the situation requires - go fuck yourself with a dry pinecone.

Today's GIF

There's at least some minimal probability that Trump isn't the first president to harbor such proclivities, but I think it's a safe bet that this is the first time it's been so widely known.

And yeah OK, there's also a fair probability that he isn't really into that, but c'mon - it's Donald-fucking-Trump. What thoroughly horrible thing is there about the guy that we're supposed to think just couldn't possibly be true at this point?  He invites that impression as a means of attracting our attention - we wouldn't wanna be rude by denying him, would we?

Today's Tweet

Why are millions of PEOPLE UNFOLLOWING TRUMP?
BOYCOTTING THE INAUGURATION#RESISTANCE pic.twitter.com/IeD2lMiMWG

— stan maloney (@YerOpinion) January 19, 2017

Thank Goodness It Wasn't Me

On Trump's plan for the White House press corps:

Watch this video on The Scene.

So Here We All Are

Right along with lots of others, I've been pissin' and moanin' about the Culture of Corruption and the fact that we've evolved a system of Legalized Bribery for quite a while.

Wilbur Ross will oversee #Trump's business patents. He'll help Trump profit from the presidency. #RiggedCabinet pic.twitter.com/uaRNzemZff

— American Bridge (@American_Bridge) January 18, 2017

They don't even bother to pretend they're trying to hide it from us anymore.

As If It Matters Now

CNN:

Last year was officially the Earth's warmest since record-keeping began in the 1880s, the World Meteorological Organization announced Wednesday morning.

That means 2016 set a global heat record for the third year in a row according to NOAA and NASA, who held a joint press conference on Wednesday to discuss the record.

 

Kaboom

Bernie's right where we need him to be, doing exactly what we need him to do. 

And sometimes, I'd just like to be there to hold the guy's coat while he fucks 'em up.

It's a simple question, @RepTomPrice. Do you believe that health care is a right of all Americans, whether rich or poor? #PriceIsWrong pic.twitter.com/7IkfgWfauF

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 18, 2017

That's A Bit Much

I'm trying hard not to think of this as a harbinger, but I'm plenty old enough to remember when a Buddhist monk in Saigon did this very thing in protest of an oppressive Daddy State  (I think it may have been in my Weekly Reader in about 5th or 6th grade); and there was a regular guy named Norman Morrison who did it just outside the Pentagon to protest the war.

They succeeded in killing themselves but we went forward with the Vietnam project anyway and a coupla million people died; at least partly because we chose to ignore the warnings.

Paraphrasing MLK, violent protest is the language of people whose voices are unheard. Maybe we could listen to what's being said this time?

#BREAKING: Man lights fire near #TrumpInternationalHotel. Employees call police. Man told me he's from CA & protesting #TrumpInauguration pic.twitter.com/noUwttKRL5

— Shomari Stone (@shomaristone) January 18, 2017

via Raw Story

A man who attempted to set himself on fire Tuesday night in front Trump International as part of a protest against the incoming president was rushed to a hospital with burns, reports NBC4.

According to DC police, they were called to the newly opened hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue hotel after receiving a report of a person “in distress.”

Speaking with reporters, the unidentified man claimed he was attempting to set himself on fire to protest the election of businessman Donald Trump, whose inauguration is set for this Friday.

“I was trying to light myself on fire as an act of protest,” the man explained before he was taken to a nearby hospital. “To protest the fact that we’ve elected someone who is completely incapable of respecting the Constitution of the United States.”

There was no report on the extent of his injuries.

Today's Podcast

Bob and Chez:



On Press Poodles and Trump's "plan" to do what Trump always does - make nice with Daddy or Daddy will fuck you up.

Starting at about 25:00, we get to the meat of the matter as the guys illustrate what looks a lot like Trump's attempt to dismantle the tattered remains of the 4th Estate - ie: consider your exile a gift, because then you'll have practically nothing more to lose and that gives you the freedom to do your job the way it's meant to be done.  You're the receiver going over the middle - there's a safety or a linebacker looking to hammer somebody.  And make no mistake, he's gonna pound your ass whether you catch the ball or not - so catch the fuckin' football.

Telling

GOP voters are begging the people they voted into office not to fuck 'em over by repealing ACA, and those representatives are high-fiving each other for moving to repeal it anyway.

What does that tell us about the GOP?

What does it tell us about ourselves?

What does it say about how fucked up it has to get before we figure out that it's fucked up?

Trump's The Chump

Donald Trump projects his own shit onto everyone else.  I realize that's not exactly news, but that is actually the point - that he just keeps hammering on it until you throw up your hands and give in.

Blue Gal and driftglass call it a Denial Of Service Attack. 
Bob and Chez call it the Tennis Ball Machine. 
Olbermann calls it Chaff.

And I can tell you, I'm struggling not to blow it all off and walk away.  For the 69 days since the election, this whole thing has felt the way I image it feels to be stuck in a war zone.

Unfortunately, I think it might just get worse after Friday.

There's no indication this guy will feel constrained in any way on anything at any time.

Here's a quick scorecard from Dana Milbank at WaPo - talking about why The Peddler-in-Chief don't get no respect:

To Trump’s many self-assigned superlatives, he can now add another: the sorest winner. With charity for none and with malice toward all but his supporters, he has in the past two months set a new standard for gracelessness in victory.

When a well-heeled practitioner of Both-Siderism like Dana Milbank puts up a column that never once says, "...but the Democrats...", maybe there's been a bit of a shift.  I won't hold my breath, but wouldn't that be nice?

Anyway, Trump likes to throw shit, and the method to this madness is to keep us from seeing the shenanigans he's really up to because we're trying to deal with all the flying shit.

Apply that to Washington, and you've got a US Congress using Trump's shit-flinging as cover for their skullduggery too.

And of course, when they think he's no longer useful, they can impeach Trump, selling that little project to us like they're a bunch of fucking heroes righting a terrible wrong and bringing the country together and blah blah blah.

With a few minor tweaks, it fits too perfectly with the usual GOP formula:

1) Fuck it up.

2) Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up".

3) Propose your "solution".

And won't that be a kick in the head? We'll be rid of Trump, and it'll only cost us our Healthcare Coverage, Social Security, Medicare and a whole package of rollbacks of basic protections on Civil Rights, Environment, Consumer Finance, etc -  plus we get President Mike Pence in the bargain. Lucky us.

Grease up and bend over, America - nobody goes unfucked.

Today's Tweet

PEOTUS is a seriously-deranged bag of poorly-executed low-end dildos.

Another horrible night porch drinking & grilling in #fifthdistrict Thanks @repjohnlewis @ajc #defendthe5th #Riseup #swatl #atl #atlanta pic.twitter.com/GE0kGRwJMt

— Dantes Rameau (@DantesRameau) January 15, 2017

Jay Smooth

Today's Today

Things were pretty lousy way back then.

So much better now.

no justice - no peace

Know Justice - Know Peace

Today's Pix

Today's Jiggery Pokery

Start Making Sense

They count on us being dumb enough to believe the crap story about a phony conspiracy like PizzaGate, so we won't be smart enough to believe the true story about the real conspiracy of Putin & his partly-trained orangutan.

Yes, It's Really Happening

Today's Tweet

Rubber, meet Road
Road, this is Rubber

My dad starts chemo Monday. Here's just ONE prescription he needs. It's really very simple: without Obamacare, within 8 months he'd be dead. pic.twitter.com/VpW3zgPYli

— Megh Wright (@megh_wright) January 14, 2017

It Won't Be OK

Widewalls - Protest Art 

What is the scope and impact of protest art? As Adorno famously wrote, ‘all art is an uncommitted crime’, meaning that art challenges the status quo by its very nature. Thus it can be argued that all art is political in the sense that it takes place in a public space and engages with an already existing ideology and dominant discourse. Yet, art can often become dangerously and explicitly political and serve as a powerful weapon. Throughout the history of social movements and social revolt, art has always reacted against oppression, violence, injustice and inequalities. Addressing socio-political issues and challenging the traditional boundaries and hierarchies imposed by those in power, art can open up the space for the marginalized to be seen and heard and contribute to the social change by producing knowledge and solidarity or simply raising awareness. In this way, the personal life and work of the artist transcends the individual and speak meaningfully to a larger audience bringing together the political and human functions of art.

NYT:

...Nadya Tolokonnikova of the Russian punk band and activist art collective Pussy Riot. The group’s 2012 guerrilla performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which viciously mocked Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, resulted in a two-year prison sentence for Ms. Tolokonnikova and another of its members.

--and--

Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.”

Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics.

Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.”

 

resist

Today's Tweet

If you're curious re the pro-Putin motives of the Greenwald alt-left, this summary might help:
1) Tear down system
2) ???
3) Progressivism!

— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) January 14, 2017

I don't like even my own tendency sometimes to do the Both Sides thing, but the reactions coming from folks like Greenwald look a lot like a leftie version of the Tea Party.  

Purity warriors are a big part of the problem.  Whether it's RINOs or DINOs, it doesn't make sense for anybody to get their panties in a bunch over it, because it just turns the whole thing into a race for the logical extreme, and the logical extreme is where everything goes to fail.

Today's Meme

Lewis voiced the opinion that Trump's election to POTUS is illegitimate - an opinion I imagine is shared by about 100 million Americans and a coupla billion people around the world.

Trump hit back with his usual Tu Quoque crap - where, instead of dealing with the criticism and defending against the charges, he tries to deflect by pointing at problems in Mr Lewis's district.

And of course it worked - because of course it always fucking works - as the Press Poodles dutifully ran off to chase the tennis ball to check on how things are in Georgia's 5th District instead of staying with the story and asking Trump about what Lewis actually said, and seeing it as another reason to pursue the slightly more important story:

Whether or not the fucking President Of The Fucking United Fucking States is a FUCKING. RUSSIAN. DUPE.

Stop falling for that shit. Know your Logical Fallacies and watch what the fuck you're doing.

Today's Podcast

@proleftpodcast

The Professional Left

buy stuff at Amazon to show your support

We Were Warned

"When we were kids, we were all afraid of the dark. And when we grew up we weren't afraid anymore, but it's funny how a big lie can make us all kids again."

On Psycopathocracy & Geejy Birds

From Juan Cole:

We are now on the brink of a new form of government, undreamed of by Aristotle, who spoke of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. We are headed to a psychopathocracy, which has something in common with the degraded form of classical regime types that Aristotle warned against (he thought monarchy can deteriorate into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into demagoguery). Psychopathocracy is the rule of persons who lack a basic ability to empathize with others, to feel their pain or to feel guilty about harming them.

Psychopathocracy is different from mere bad policy. We can all disagree about the direction of government or particular initiatives. Often people backing a policy that harms others do not understand the harm, or think it is averting a greater harm. It isn’t true that all high politicians are psychopaths who don’t care about injury being done to people. And high politicians have put in programs like social security that have lifted millions of elders out of poverty over decades. They did it because they cared about people.

--and--

CEOs of corporations and successful politicians are also disproportionately likely to be psychopaths. Robert Hare developed a 20-point checklist for the condition, which, however, does not exactly overlap with the definition in DSM-V, the description of mental conditions put out by the American Psychiatric Association. Hare did some of his research in prisons and so his checklist is skewed a bit for criminal activity.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to recognize that Donald J. Trump and several nominees to his incoming administration exhibit obvious signs of psychopathy. Having psychopaths in the White House is not unprecedented. It seems pretty obvious that Dick Nixon, a pathological liar who actually derailed the 1968 peace negotiations with Vietnam to keep his rival Hubert Humphrey from looking good to the voters, had this condition. Untold American soldiers and Vietnamese peasants died so Nixon could be president.

So it's not really a new thing at all.  I guess it just seems new because we don't see it so blatantly exhibited very often.

The two big questions remain tho - how do we explain our apparent willingness to accept this shit?  

And knowing that forms of government take on an aspect of self-perpetuation, what has to happen to get us back to where we think we need to be?

Cuz this looks a lot like the end of one Geejy Bird, and (maybe) the beginning of the next.

Every government is a geejy bird.

The geejy bird is a strange creature; it flies only once in its lifetime, but that flight is a spectacle to behold. The geejy bird appears suddenly, standing on a limb, young, elegant, proud and respectable.  Surveying the horizon, it spreads its majestic wings and swoops upward in a wide graceful curve, with magnificent wing flappings and loud glory whoops.  When it reaches maximum altitude, it begins its elegant descent, an ever narrowing spiral.  It makes smaller and smaller circles in the sky until, suddenly and mysteriously, it vanishes through its own asshole.

No one knows where geejy birds go - probably back where they came from.  Unfortunately, when they go, they take us along.  We are all subjects of one geejy bird or another; we are born and live and die during one of these mad flights.  To be born early is, at least, exciting; the air sparkles with hopes and dreams, and there are worthwhile things to be done.  To board the flight in the soaring stage is next best; there is a fresh wind and a feel of strong wings and a dizzying view of the world.

But what about those of us who are born near the end of the flight?  We can't jump off; the fall would be fatal.  In vain we scream, "Turn around, great geejy bird! Turn back in thy flight!"  Too late.  There is nothing to do but make the best of it.  We snap to attention, salute, and begin to sing our stirring anthem.  "God Bless Our Geejy Bird!"  Together we enter the turd tunnel to oblivion.

The Rape of the A*P*E* (page 174) --Allan Sherman