Friday Thoughts

The penny dreadful was what I intended to write about, and perhaps I will. The serious side of me is appalled, of course, since how can I write about the penny dreadful when James Comey, the former director of the FBI just got indicted by the Justice Department? I should tell you, at least, that Comey went before a senate committee and told the truth. The Russians had done everything they could to help Trump win the election, and that’s just what we know.

 

It's just like my drinking was: a lot worse than you can imagine. So if we know that Putin set up a full-time shop in St. Petersburg to peddle fake news (sorry, but yeah) to gullible conservatives in 2015, you can be sure he did a lot more that we don’t know about. 

 

I remember the first time I realized that the president had been…compromised? Breached? What’s the word for a guy who is being blackmailed and has to get elected to save his skin?

 

Even worse, what’s the word for a guy who knows that the Russians have the dirt on him, but he doesn’t know what dirt it is? There being a lot of dirt, of course, and the Epstein files (which may or not be in Putin’s top right-hand desk drawer) are perhaps the least of it.

 

The idea that the president was compromised—that he was under the thumb to a large if not a complete extent of the Russians—was utterly jarring. I stood still in the living room in 2015, after the news of the Steele Dossier came out, and pondered if it was true. The sensational tidbit, of course, was the golden showers scene that Trump allegedly enjoyed with the two prostitutes in the room where Barrack and Michele Obama had slept.

 

Some stuff I believe because it’s entirely believable. Some stuff I believe because it’s not believable—it’s so unbelievable that who would cook it up? And some stuff I believe because it fits: Trump is traumatically insecure, his weak ego demands that others be humiliated, and sex is dirty for him (as it is for me, because we both grew up in the fifties and early sixties). Whether the story is true or not misses the point. It’s the old story of needing to ask if a woman is a lady: she’s not, by definition, because if you need to ask the question, you already have your answer.

 

Nobody, by the way, has ever had to ask whether either of the Bush presidents or Obama himself were diddling anyone on the side. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, on the other hand….

 

So this is serious, more serious by far than the penny dreadful. The penny dreadful is absolutely ridiculous and I am not going to say another word about it. I will devote myself to serious topics, today.

 

It’s a shame, really, since who could not love the dreadful? And I was going to say something about the book, which is more important than golden showers and senate committees.

 

You may scoff at the penny dreadful, of course, and if so, you’re in excellent company. Everybody sneers at the dreadful, which I will tell you (finally) is not much of a book at all. It’s a couple of sections of eight or sixteen pages each sewn crudely together, with no cover but a slightly thicker paper (for me, cardstock) with a cheap illustration. The whole affair is slipshod and cheap, as it had to be since the dreadful cost, as you can very well imagine, a penny.

 

It was trash, in many instances, but what a wonderful thing trash is! Trash (without sounding too much like John Steinbeck) is the mark of high civilization. In the slums of Bombay or Haiti, there’s no trash. They make musical instruments out of oil drums and coke cans; they build houses out of packing crates. You’ve got to be seriously well off to throw stuff away.

 

So the penny dreadful occupies a very serious place (he said flippantly) in the history of the book. The price of paper, which had been very expensive but was at least cheaper than raising and killing calves for parchment, had plummeted. True, the paper was lousy quality, but nobody ever intended the dreadful to be around for longer than a week or two. Who cared?

 

So paper was cheap, and guess what? Everybody had learned to read, by the time the dreadful rolled around, which was great. Literacy rates in the 18^th and 19^th century were at last out of the single digits, though far from 100%. Still, the days of producing elaborate, jeweled tomes for the elite and the entitled were not over but…well, shared, perhaps. Not everybody could afford to buy this (myself included):

 

 

 

That, of course, would cost a pretty penny.

 

We can all agree that the book above demands respect; you should probably go to confession before you touch it. But the dreadful gloried in its cheapness. It invited the dirtiest hands and the filthiest minds to enjoy it. Its purpose was amusement, not instruction—though in fact the dreadful could concern itself with religious instruction and educational material as well. But mention the penny dreadful, and everybody will immediately see this, in their mind’s eye:

 

 

I utterly love this, and in fact, I utterly need this. Because I can’t spend the morning horrified by a president who is trying to put his political enemy (meaning a guy who told the truth) in jail. It’s Friday, and I want to make it into Saturday sober.

 

The penny dreadful came along with the rise of the literate population, and was helped by the availability of cheap paper. But it was also helped by the rise of peddlers, who walked the countryside selling knives and pins and pots and (if he had some room in his bag) cheap stuff for people to read. The chapbook, which is the dreadful’s more respectable elder brother, was also carried around by peddlers. Both the penny dreadful and the chapbook were, as the name implies, cheap. In fact, the “chap” in chapbook is derived from the old English cēap which, yes, means cheap.

 

The book, in short, has been evolving with us over time. When monks were in charge of things, we got the bejeweled, illuminated manuscripts which we marvel at (and walk past) today. When the economy got perking, and ordinary folk started reading, we got the penny dreadful and the chapbook.

 

Now we have the internet, which everybody (including Meryl Streep) thinks is going to kill the book.

 

Will it?

 

I have no idea. But I couldn’t make books, nowadays, without the internet. I wouldn’t even knowabout the chapbook or the penny dreadful without the internet. I couldn’t decide, as I have just decided, to download the tale of Varney the Vampire. 

 

Gotta go—my fingers are itching! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Penny Dreadful

It’s always interesting how an art form or even an institution that is dying can linger on for decades.

 

Opera, for example. Yes, everybody there is very old, very white, and usually pretty monied. But it’s always been that way, and people were predicting the death of opera at its heyday.

 

There’s the Catholic church, which has survived female popes, a split papacy, and sex scandals, of which the most recent have been, well, only the most recent.

 

Then there’s the book—and that’s serious. The book is dying, or so said Meryl Streep in a documentary, and since I make books, I felt I really had to check it out.

 

It’s horrifying, the number of people who are functionally illiterate. But even worse are those who can read but don’t or won’t. All of that is bad, but I wonder if the real problem isn’t much, much worse.

 

We seem to have two speeds: hyper-stimulated or drugged. We are presented with “music” everywhere: in parking garages, in elevators, on hold on the telephone. We are insane about music, to the extent that no one can believe that I know literally nothing about Bad Bunny. The fact that my Uber driver picked up a woman from Pakistan who had come to Puerto Rico (and spent 6 months learning Spanish) only to attend his concert tells me everything.

 

Let me be clear. There is NO background music. There is NOTHING that you can play in the background that will not be a distraction. I can sit in a room where everyone is smoking cigars. I cannot be in a room with background music.

 

It’s a problem, solved only by putting my music on top of your music. So in the café where I bind books—whatever the cashier puts on the store speakers, and whatever French song is playing in the adjoining exhibit is what I will have to endure.

 

The problem is that I am listening, and they are not. In fact, they’re completely unconscious of whatever they’re hearing. But try turning the radio or the television off. It’ll work, until the next person strolls by, and turns it back on. It is unthinkable for us to endure silence.

 

Or maybe it’s unthinkable for us to endure thinking. Because as much as I can, that’s generally what I’m doing. But a lot of people use music / TV / cell phones the way I use air freshener—it masks the stink, but doesn’t get rid of it.

 

We forget how recent all of this stuff is. My grandmother, born in the 1880’s, grew up in a world without radio or television. She had a piano in the parlor, because most people did. She had a deck of cards. She had books.  She had friends to talk to.

 

Her daughter, my mother, was born in 1920—and I can now tell you that the first radio station (so thinks AI) was KDKA in Pittsburgh. Interesting but untrue—I grew up listening to WHA in Madison, Wisconsin, so I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that WHA is “the oldest station in the nation.” They told us that every hour or so. Radio was great because you could clean house or bind books or generally do stuff that needed doing. It also didn’t occupy your visual cortex, so the image of a child in a cage or a Viet Cong village burning didn’t stay in your brain all day. It was in keeping with a long tradition of reading aloud—whether in a monastery, as you chew your meal in silence listening to Brother Sixtus read Thessalonians, or a cigar factory, where one person was designated the “lector.” In fact, the experience was essentially similar to a citizen of Athens hearing the saga of Odysseus recited by a guy in a toga with a lyre. My mother listened to radio very little until the end of her life, when she liked to listen to NPR in the morning. She had her woods—20 acres of it—and her dog and her books. Oh, and friends. 

 

Anyway, radio sneaked in the same year that my mother did, and television snuck in about the time I got going, in 1956. It was scorned by people like me, and by my parents as well. It was the “boob tube,” and it was going to make us dumber. We had a television when I was quite little, but it died, and nobody really thought about replacing it. I was delighted, since I had my cello and books. Oh, and friends.

 

I didn’t miss television because televisions hissed in those days. Take 3 aspirins every four hours for the next week, and you’ll have a nice case of tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. And that’s what living in the 70’s and 80’s was—the television was always on, and always hissing. I heard it, but almost no one else did—since the television had done its job and numbed us all. 

 

Why did the old televisions hiss?

 

In the old days, I’d have to take a shower, shave, walk to the bus stop, and go to the public library. I’d look in the card catalogue, I’d ask the librarian. I would get the answer, perhaps, but with far greater effort than I got this, from AI:

 

Old televisions, specifically Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) models, emit a high-pitched sound due to the flyback transformer generating high voltage at a frequency near the upper limit of human hearing (around 15-20 kHz). This vibration of components like the transformer's core, caused by rapidly changing current, produces an audible whine, often referred to as coil whine. As these components age, they can vibrate more, potentially making the sound louder.  

 

Oddly, the next big thing was not the Internet but the cell phone. True, the personal computer—which was such a big thing that we called it a “PC”—looked for a time to be the next thing. People would be spending time not with their televisions, but with their PCs, and indeed one of my friends did just that. His wife watched the “novellas” or soaps in the living room, he was surfing the net in the study.

 

You might call it the golden age of the PC—back there sometime just before the turn of the century. The PC wasn’t cheap—it could easily set you back a couple of thousand bucks. It also required an inquisitive mind willing to learn a lot of things most people didn’t want to learn. You turned the thing on and were presented with a cold green screen, on which you tried to find something blinking. Then you had to meet the computer somewhere in the middle space between your brain / fingers and the computer’s brain and logic. Here’s how we interacted with the PC, before cell phones:

 

 

You had to be pretty smart and quite patient to learn all of this. That meant that the entry level was high, and it meant that my friend, twice as smart as I and a professor of philosophy, could chat with an Oxford don as he looked out on the quadrangle. This was, and still is to my mind, totally cool.

 

We’re now at the cell phone, and we’re not stopping there—not by a long shot. Because have you noticed? The technology is getting closer and closer, trying to get in.

 

Books stay on the shelves, which are usually attached to the walls of the living room. They live on those shelves until we take them down and put them in our hand or on our coffee tables. The radio lived closer—it got into the bathroom and the kitchen, and certainly the family car. Television stepped right into the center of the living room and grabbed everyone’s attention (before it numbed them into submission). There is a television in the club where I am writing, and it is of course on. It is also completely ignored, especially by the person who is sleeping on the sofa in front of it. If I turn the television off, the silence will awaken him and he’ll be indignant.

 

The cell phone was the necessary bridge between technology and the human body. Why do old televisions hiss? The answer was right in my hand, if I knew where my cell phone was and had paid the 80 bucks to ATT to use it. I fear the day, which I know is coming, when the human flesh of the left palm will be replaced by a synthetic flesh with an internet connection.  

 

It's looking for a way in, remember?

 

It's either the hands or the eyes. There are also goggles that let you see the world outside and cruise the internet. I could be crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and watching the Ken Burns documentary about the making of the bridge on YouTube at the same time. The documentary is supposed to be great, and I’d like to see it. 

 

In my living room.

 

Because if I saw the documentary while walking across the bridge, what would I be missing? Would I be looking at and chatting with John and Jeanne, as I did when I crossed the bridge for the first time on foot with them? Would I have heard the sea gulls above us, or felt the wind tug, or seen the boats disappearing from one side of the bridge and reappearing on the other?

 

We can close a book—in many ways—and turn off our radios and televisions. I can turn off my cell phone as well, and do. But would I rather lose my wallet or my cell phone? The wallet has really important stuff, like money and credit cards and also my identity (driver’s license, and Social Security card), but my cell phone has my life (my photos / memories, my music, my personal information about whom I date or want to date, and the telephone numbers, none of which I know, of all of my friends).

 

Oh, and my cell phone shows me pictures of tits and ass, if that’s what I’m into. Not saying that I am, just that a lot of people are.

 

So it’s trying to get in, this technology of ours, and it will, though under what guise I don’t know. It might claim to be convenient—no monthly payments, no losing data! It doesn’t have that app FindMyPhone which I really need, though how I can FindMyPhone when the PhoneIsWhatI’mLookingFor is beyond me.

 

The other way in will be children. What horror is worse than not knowing where your kid is? My mother kicked me out of the house to go to school, which today would be called neglect / abuse, since I was walking unsupervised for a mile in sub-zero weather to get to Midvale Elementary School. Anything could have happened to me, and no parent would do it today. Today, I might ponder microchipping my child, just as I might the family dog. The United States is obsessed with the safety of our children, which is good idea, until we start using it to further our ends. Then, preschool teachers become sly sadistic Satanists, and barely a child escapes their clutches without being sacrificed in an obscene and bloody Satanic ritual. 

 

Remember this lady?

 

 Well, she’s dead now, Virginia McMartin, but can we rest easy? No, because if we don’t have to worry now about preschool teachers, we still have this to concern ourselves with:

  

They’re out there, those communists and radicals and leftists, and they hate our country. And the cell phone, which can triangulate and geolocate any user at any time (in case our CCTVs are misfunctioning)—well, it ain’t good enough. The first thing I will do, if I decide to rob a bank, is leave my phone behind. And if I decide to blow up Mount Rushmore, I’ll probably leave my face, wallet, and phone behind (fake beard and mustache, if you’re wondering). So as a protective measure, we should microchip the atheists / communists / radical left as well as the kids.

 

How easy it will be for our technology, with its artificial intelligence, to invade us.

 

All the while showing us tits and ass, of course, which is the main thing.

 

It’ll be inside us, and then encouraging and self-affirming thoughts can be put into our kids’ brains, without the need to take them camping or to church:

 

         You are a child of God and deeply loved

         Your parents love you

         Clean your room

         Donald Trump is the true son of God

 

This will be handy, of course, since now I won’t have to spend a morning getting to the library to find out why old TVs hiss. I won’t even have to find my phone. The AI will be seamlessly integrated with my own (lesser) operating system, and will provide the answer.

 

So what to do with the book, which is lying on my coffee table or on my shelves?

Meryl Streep doesn’t know, though she spent an agreeable and intellectually stimulating 53 minutes on YouTube telling me why.

 

I think I know, and I’ll tell you, if my addled brain can remember to do it. But what I really, really want today is not to talk about the book.

 

I wanna talk about the Penny Dreadfuls! 

 

Busy with Chapbooks

 

It’s gotten very bad, lately, so I might as well confess that I don’t have the heart for it, today. I cannot answer to you, my ancestors who have lived (some of them) in the United States since before it was the United States.  You, Henry Herrick, who as magistrate in Salem, Massachusetts, hung the witches in Salem town in 1672! I applaud you, I venerate you. We can all agree, surely, that it was the right thing to do at the time. And after the winds had shifted, how beautifully you tacked your sails! Yes indeed, your confession that the devil had lured YOU into thinking that that old pipe-smoking hag that you had chained hand and feet in the town jail (or gaol, don’t know which variant was current at the time) and whose inherited, ramshackle property neatly abutted your well-tended field…was a witch! Well, it was masterful.

 

And you—Dr. Nicholas Coleman Pickard! You were no fool, either. You were smart enough to choose a life with no internet, and to do only two things that stuck in the family memory. You left your country practice and your ailing relicts and took a train ride (I presume it was train, though there’s absolutely no excuse not to Google it, since it could have been a carriage) to Richmond, Virginia. I want to know, of course, what you ate on the train, or what you read, or whether you sat, motionless, and stared out the window. You were alone with your thoughts, wise man.

 

But you made sure your granddaughter, who was my grandmother (and how is that possible?), was a writer, just like all the rest of us. You had her tell your tale, the tale of a broken country doctor, whose cherished son had heard the siren song of his mother, a staunch abolitionist. Did she give him Uncle Tom’s Cabin, after she had finished with it? Did she stir what fire there was in his muscular young groin—did she fan the flames of heroism?

 

Pickard ended up on the train, going to Richmond and Libby Prison. A hell-hole, worse than Alligator Alcatraz. An old warehouse, it was now where the Confederates stored the wounded and dying. Those two terms were interchangeable, the country doctor knew. Especially in a small cramped room with no ventilation in the middle of a Virginia summer; the smell must have been unendurable.

 

A cry breaks out in the cacophony of the room. A bird knows the sounds of her fledgling crying for food from their nests in the forest. Pickard turns his head involuntarily toward the sounds coming from the cot crammed with so many others in the foul room. There are no paths, no aisles. He steps over other people’s wounded sons, trying to find his own.

 

No luck, only a strapping young black man raising his head weakly from the pillow. He glances at the boy, sickened by the sight. The boy gestures again and then calls…

 

“Father!”

 

He falls back, dead.

 

(Of course, my grandmother was telling this tale…)

 

Pickard draws nearer, disgusted at the sight, but curious, as a medical man would be, at this intersection of life, death, and disfigurement. He sees that the man isn’t black at all. He recognizes mercurochrome when he sees it, dripping off the face of the young man.

 

The young white man.

 

The man who is his son.

 

He can bear no more—the noise, the cries, the desperation all drive him to flee. But not without his son. He tries to lift his body, but any medical man would have known it was impossible.

 

Dead weight.

 

He’ll flee, but come back the next morning, after a very bad night of it. He’ll grease the palm of the Confederate soldier who has the one thing in life that matters to him. He’ll even be civil, though it kills him. And he’ll take that long carriage or train ride back. His son, now in a plain wooden coffin—and how that materialized is another story—is lying several train cars away.

 

Pickard made it back to Lena, Illinois, to his fire-eating abolitionist wife. He has another child with his dragon-wife and then leaves, to go find gold.

 

WHAT!  

 

You do know, Doctor, that this is a joke in our times. The guy who runs out for cigarettes, and come right back…

 

…20 years later!

 

Dude, the Gold Rush was in 1849, which is why (I think) there’s a football team somewhere out there called the ‘49ers. You took off in the late 1860’s. Oh, and your obituary ratted you out, since you died at your daughter’s house, not sitting around the campfire, where the bucket awaits for you to kick. And you had been doctoring there up until 3 years before your respectable death, you who admired Christian principles unto the day you died.

 

Anyway, I have no time for you, my Ancestors. No time even to save this country I love. No time to save the country from its worst enemy, which is us. “Us” is going to have to wait, in line with the Ancestors.

 

Lady’s birthday is next week.

 

And I gotta make a chapbook.

 

Here’s the textblock below.

 

 

 

 

 

Desperately Seeking Janet 

 

“The problem I’m having,” I told Lady, “is that we’ve lost the art of recuperation. In fact, I wonder if we’ve even lost the art of sickness. It used to be an honorable estate, just like marriage, but now it’s stigmatized. You used to be able to be a sickly person, a person who enjoyed—in every sense—ill health. Look at Florence Nightingale: she got done with the Crimean War at a relatively young age, came home, went to bed, and never got up again. True, from her sick bed she did a great deal—invent modern nursing, pioneer statistics in health sciences, even try to reform the War Office. But she did it all as an invalid, which is absolutely what I want to be at the moment.”

 

“What,” cried Lady, “not possible. Your spot is at the last red table before the shrine to Clara Lair. You can’t be an invalid!” 

 

“There’s no transition,” I told her. “I went from being at imminent danger of paralysis to being, seemingly, out of the woods. And am I grateful? Yes, but I long, somehow, for a lingering recovery. And I definitely wish I had been more demanding, a la Florence. She made everybody’s life impossible by being the constant martyr. How everyone pressed her, a poor frail woman forced by cruel fate to face insuperable odds! Yes, I should have had all you people around, and put you to work! My pillow! How can you expect me to rest, let alone recover, when my pillow is as hard as a rock! Janet! Fluff the pillow at once, Janet!”

 

“Who’s Janet?”

 

“You are,” I told Lady, “since all chauffeurs are named James, and all ladies’ maids are named Janet. And as Janet, you would have been completely at my beck and call. Janet! Janet! I must have my tea! At once, and see that it isn’t stone cold as it was yesterday! Ah, how all of you vex me, try me, a poor cripple barely able to raise his head above the pillow, and all of you—hale and able bodied—doing nothing but vex me! I suffer, I suffer, how greatly do I suffer!”

 

“Marc?”

 

“Yes, you, Janet—you are the very worst of the lot! How you loll about, wagging your tongue at any passerby, throwing yourself at the butcher’s boy and the postal clerk, when you know, Janet, you know that I lie in agony, virtually having crossed the vale and into the arms of our savior, and do you care? Not a whit! Ah, fie, Janet.”

 

“Fie, Marc?”

 

“Fie indeed,” I told her, “and I’ve always wanted to use that word. Anyway, the point is that someone—if not a league of someones—should have been lingering around my bed, anxiously pressing cooling handkerchiefs to my fevered brow….”

 

“But you fell, Marc, you didn’t have a fever….”

 

“If I am in bed,” I scolded her, “I have by definition a fevered brow. Every invalid knows that. So first you refuse to be Janet, and now you completely ignore my fevered brow, which may in fact trigger—I fear it greatly—a reverse. And nothing, as you know, could be worse than a reverse!”

 

“You mean a relapse?”

 

“I have no idea what a relapse is,” I told her, “but a reverse would call for the gravest of measures. Janet, summon the doctor—the doctor must attend me at once, ere I perish!” 

 

“But how do I know…”

 

“Curse the girl! Haven’t I told her that I am having a reverse? Janet, fetch the doctor, and then have the goodness to summon the solicitor, and then the vicar or the curate, whichever it is who abides in the village and attends to those soon to leave this vale of tears!”

 

“But Marc….”

 

“No, Janet, another morn I shall not see, and may it rest on your shoulders, Janet—you, who met my love with insolence; You, who closed your ears to my feeble pleas for succor; You who closed your eyes even as I grew pale, and lingered facing the grim visage of death itself. Yes, Janet, you vexing creature, on your head shall rest the death of one who loved too much, and was cast a base coin by all who knew her!”

 

“Her, Marc? Don’t you mean ‘him?’”

 

“I shall not be gainsaid,” I cried. “Do not try me with trifles, I so soon to cross the bar, to meet my maker face to face….”

 

“Hey, Tennyson,” said Lady, “I know that one! ‘And I hope to meet my maker face to face….’”

 

“You really made a hash of it, you know,” I told her. “You were completely useless as Janet. And you know what? There was absolutely no Janetry anywhere on the horizon, all those months when I suffered alone and unattended, cruelly cast off from an uncaring world….”

 

“Well, you could have called….”

 

“No, I was thrust onto the dust heap,” I told her. “When the story of my life is writ…”

 

“You mean written….”

 

“IS WRIT,” I told her. “And I certainly know what I mean. No, the stones themselves will shed passels of tears….”

 

“Passels?”

 

“Passels—and don’t ask me what they are, or send me searching through Google to find out. If I tell you the stones themselves…”

“Fie, Marc,” said Lady, getting up from the seat she had never sat in (which made it easy to vacate, and anybody can see that!) “Fie, Marc, this post has been a complete waste of time! No information, no narrative, just a lot of tomfoolery, and I won’t be called Janet!”

 

She flounces out the door.

 

You see how cruelly I am used? 

 

Not Important

I suppose I should do it once, before I go on to more important things.

 

Because 50,000$ in cash isn’t really that important, in the grand scheme of things. I’d like it, of course, and I’d take it, if you wanted to give it to me in a paper bag. Tom Homan did, if you believe The New York Times:

 

  

 

The news broke Saturday night, and was briefly everywhere. But the next day was Charlie Kirk’s funeral, which was attended by thousands, covered extensively in the media, and ended with Trump telling everybody that he hated his enemies.

 

The New York Times broke the story and applied all the usual caveats, whether out of journalistic integrity or fear of being sued. Homan wasn’t a public official at the time he took the money—can he still be charged? Nor had Homan made a specific promise to do anything in exchange for the money. The FBI handed him the 50,000$ in a bag from Cava, a supermarket chain, and he gave them the promise that he’d keep them in mind if the Trump administration hired him (again). Since Homan had worked for the first Trump administration, and since he was saying things like this…

 

…if "Trump comes back in January, I'll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain't seen shit yet. Wait until 2025." On July 17 at the 2024 Republican National Convention, Homan called Biden's immigration policies "national suicide" and told "millions of illegal aliens" to "start packing". Homan said that drug cartels would be designated as terrorist organizations and that Donald Trump would "wipe them off the face of the earth."

 

Homan had been around; he was the architect of the family separation policy that split parents from their parents. Since the parents weren’t around, something had to be done with the kids. So he put them in cages. You remember photos like this, from a time when we woke up every morning and felt proud to be an American:

 In November of 2024, Trump was already promising that if he were elected, Homan would be his border czar. He was a man of his word, and The New York Times went on to say:

 

After Mr. Trump took office this year, Justice Department officials shut down the case because of doubts about whether prosecutors could prove to a jury that Mr. Homan had agreed to do any specific acts in exchange for the money, and because he had not held an official government position at the time of the meeting with undercover agents, the people added.

 

Homan fell into a trap set not by the FBI but by his own stupidity and cupidity. The FBI, according to the Times, was investigating somebody else, who told them that the palm to grease was not his but Homan’s. So that’s when they dropped by to see whether 50,000$ was all it took.

 

It was, but why Homan took it is a mystery. He hadn’t done badly for himself in the interregnum: he had been one of the authors of Project 2025 and had started an organization called Border911, to educate people about what having a safe border could do for folks. He had also, according to the Times..

 

He also opened a consulting business that has worked for companies seeking immigration-related contracts, including those poised to benefit from Mr. Trump’s policies, The Times reported in January. At one point, he was paid between $100,000 and $150,000 to lobby in Texas for Fisher Industries, a construction firm that last year secured a $225 million contract with the state to build a section of border wall.

 

Exactly! Forget the bags of cash—that’s for amateurs. The real money, of course, can’t be stuffed into a plastic bag. It will arrive more stealthily, and in far greater sums than a grocery bag can hold. That quarter of a BILLION-dollar contract to build a “section” of the wall has plenty of money for everybody, and everybody will pay the hand of the person who opened the doors and got the contract.

 

If the contractors on the wall don’t come through, there are other sources as well. Homan got a gig on Fox News, he joined the Heritage Foundation, and lastly, according to Wikipedia:

 

Homan received at least $5,000 in consulting fees from GEO Group in the two years before he joined the second Trump administration.^[32][33] GEO Group is the largest prison operator in the United States, with facilities including for-profit private prisons and immigration detention centers.

 

It has to be said: the tip of this iceberg is already impressively big.

Prisons are big business in our new world—since when I was a kid, grown men were sort of squeamish about making money by locking people up. Prisons were necessary (sadly) as much as schools (happily). But nobody made any money out of teaching kids or locking them up in later life. It would have been unseemly.

You know, like making money off of health care.

Wikipedia has heard of the GEO group as well, and doesn’t have much good to say about them. They’re worth 2.4 billion dollars: since it costs between 35, 000 to 40,000 dollars a year to house one prisoner.

The point isn’t what Homan did, the point is what we’re not doing. We are eulogizing Charlie Kirk, a guy who was brutally murdered in broad daylight in front of a crowd of college kids. His death is horrific, and whatever part of his life is worthy of praise should be eulogized.

It’s easy to eulogize a man you don’t know, and on whom you can hang your political / personal views. What’s harder to do is to examine all the crooks that Trump has gathered around him. All the contracts he can bestow. All the little ways—from using lesser-quality materials (or fewer of them) in building contracts to employing illegal immigrants to build the prisons to house…

…illegal immigrants.

These people are crooks, and the only ones supporting them are cowards who fear losing out on the money that’s slushing around. Susan Collins? Lisa Murkowski? Wringing their hands and telling everybody they’re scared doesn’t cut it.

Trump is building a ball room on top of the White House Rose Garden for nobody but his rich friends, and you can be sure that each bag of cement comes with a buck or two slipped into Trump’s pocket. Or Trump’s friends’ pocket.

This isn’t ideological, or if it is, it’s only coincidentally so. Government contracts come with lots of red tape: environmental impact statements, labor regulations, inspections, and finally inspectors general who take a look at the thing once it’s all done and try to make sure that nobody grifted too badly.

Trump has gotten rid of many of those things. He can build shit fast—the ice-skating rink in Central Park comes to mind—but how good is it? What damage did it do, along the way? And whose pocket got stuffed?

 So Trump is building a ballroom, and short of doing a séance with Albert Speer, the thing couldn’t look more Third Reich. But it’ll be nice to have, since we won’t have a presidential library. Why should we? The dude can’t read.

So it’ll work out nicely. After this mess is done—and it’s nowhere near over—we can convict Trump and all his cronies. Building cages, as we’ve seen, is child’s play.

Then we can put them in it, and let the president and all his men find solace in the Bible (which was the only book they gave to Abrego García down there in El Salvador). There’s much to reflect on, in the Bible, and the hours will fly by. No time to look at all the gawdy gold drippings flung against the wall…

…as seen through a chain link fence.