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The Damn Fool is about to put The Onion out of business for good. This...from March 25 of this year.
EVANSTON, WY—Throwing bottles of bleach, ammonia, and Drano into a cart at his local grocery store, area man Troy Mitchell was reportedly stocking up on one of every cleaning product he could find Wednesday in case President Donald Trump announces it is a coronavirus cure. “I got toilet bowl cleaner, carpet cleaner, Swiffer WetJet refills—you name it—just so me and my family will be ready if the president announces one of these things can treat Chinese virus,” said Mitchell, indiscriminately throwing containers of laundry detergent, Scrubbing Bubbles, grout whitener, steel wool, Febreze, Tilex mold and mildew remover, and laptop screen wipes into the cart, the contents of which rang up to $2,513.67 at checkout. “I’m not getting caught without some oven degreaser should Trump say it’s going to save us, so I better go ahead and grab me a bottle...
And now...from the New York Daily News
The satirical newspaper ran a story nearly a month ago featuring a fictional grocery shopper in Wyoming stocking up on $2,513.67 worth of bleach, ammonia, and Drano in case the president suddenly suggested human consumption of such things could be the magical potion he’s been searching for to cure the pandemic that’s spread across the U.S. at an incomparable rate.
***
That suddenly less-funny March 25 article eerily foreshadowed a press conference the president held Thursday, where he suggested cleaning agents might knock out the virus that has killed more than 193,000 people worldwide in roughly five months, according to Johns Hopkins University.
We live in a country of sheer insanity run by a madman...among so many other things.
I mean, this Daily News story, out of Iran has been out there too.
I mean, I do think that I have the language to describe these times in the United States...but I think that I would have to delve into the language of the macabre to do it, sadly, unfortunately.
Which brings up a question.
Which artist would you choose to document these times...and why?
(It can be any art form: literature, theater, song, film, dance, etc.)
My own personal choice for documenting these times would be the late, great blind Argentinian librarian and writer Jorge Luis Borges.
In much of Mr. Borges writing (and I have read most of it), he had a real gift of making the ordinary extraordinary and making the extraordinary seem...commonplace. Given that Mr. Borges had an intense personal dislike for Juan and Eva Peron, I never felt that I could exactly trust what he had to write about...a similar ruler to The Damn Fool, in some ways.
(For the record, yes, I know that Borges was politically quite conservative and that he even gave early support to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; that support for Pinochet probably cost Borges a Nobel Prize.)
I also think that with so much going on with The Damn Fool that’s so...over-the-top, no one could find and note the most subtle of things about our times in quite the way that Borges could.
Comments below the fold:
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From Paul A:
I have to recommend justMike's announcement in Greg Dworkin's APR today -- "bring the kids".
From Inkstainedwretch:
Many, many, many good diaries and comments today. Like this from SottoVoce (from hungry coyote’s recommended post), I hope Americans are seeing in this massive health and economic crisis exactly what Republicans want out of America.
From elenacarlena:
Bending the rules a bit, but bear with me: I'd like to nominate this title for Top Title, A Bleachable Moment bu Runyonr. Not only is it hilarious, but it led (so far) to a top comment from Implicate Order.
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