I confess, I’d been a little worried about the future of the sport until I read this report, which was of great relief and eased my mind considerably.

Oh, I know, I know, those nattering nabobs of negativity in the press played it the other way, acting all aghast that one in four players will wind up with brains scrambled like the breakfast bowl at Denny’s.

But if sports betting has taught us anything, it’s that you roll with the favorite. Matter of fact, this could be a new money stream that even the betting markets haven’t thought of yet. Will Stefon Diggs wind up with CTE? The odds open at +115.

Of course there’s probably no line on Tua Tagovailoa. He’s already had his bell rung more times than Westminster Palace. But come on, these are football players. If Cam Skattebo gets brain damaged, how will they tell?

Still, I don’t need this, because it’s going to be one more little hair on the roof of our conscience as we’re watching games this fall. How can we actively cheer on an activity in which we know 25% of the participants will have horrific outcomes?

Must everything we do make us feel guilty?

The only satisfactory answer is to not think about it, the way we don’t think about our bacon coming from hogs that were never given the space to turn around, or that our shirt was made by a nine-year-old kid who six days of the week never sees the sun shine.

That’s easy enough, right?

Matter of fact, it hasn’t been all that long ago that football injuries were considered to be funny. You may remember that candy bar ad where the trainer is checking out the quarterback who just took a big hit:

How many fingers am I holding up?

Three.

What day is it?

Sunday.

Who are you?

I am Batman.

Not going anywhere for a while? Have a Snickers.*

On ESPN they had an actual segment called “Jack You Up” where four guys would all laugh like hyenas at the week’s most brutal hits and then all four grown men would shout in unison. “We’re going to JACK YOU UP!”

OK, so we’ll stipulate that segment didn’t age well. But you know, boys will be boys, even when they’re 40.

Besides, we’ll be told the same thing we’re always told when young people go marching off to war: They know the risks, they chose this life. This is our get out of jail free card — it’s not our idea of fun, but hey, they believe it their ecclesiastical duty to be out there knocking the snot out of each other, so if it doesn’t bother them it shouldn’t bother us.

This is the same treatment we give the climber who’s just fallen off of El Capitan: “Well, he died doing what he loved to do.”

OK, I guess. But we say this for our benefit, not his. Whether he would feel the same way is cloudy because at this stage of the game he is obviously in no condition to answer our philosophical inquiries.

And there is evidence that we, as spectators, are not immune from the football mindset. This week a fan ran out onto the field and tripped up a nine-year-old running back as he was running for a touchdown, and elsewhere two high school coaches got into a melee, reasons unknown.

First, I’d point out that this isn’t new. Our own notably hot-headed high school coach* got into it with the opposing coach c. 1975, but there were no camera phones at that time, so it never made ABC Nightly News (although it did create quite the buzz in the Monday morning home room).

As for the parent who tripped the running back, it is with only a small bit of shame that I admit that this man is my hero. How many times has life dealt us a bad hand and we just sit there and take it. Not this guy. You can meekly remain in the bleachers and let life punch you in the mouth, or you can take a stand.

Million bucks says that fellow had just been demoted at work, yelled at by his wife and lost a wheel bearing in his car. And then when the other side was going to score he just said, “Huh-uh, no, nope, not happening.”

Lord, I admire that gumption. So it is with that spirit in mind I say bring on Patriots-Seahawks.

* Then there was referee Ron Cherry’s immortal call during a Maryland-North Carolina State game, “Personal foul, No. 69, offense, for givin’ him the business.”

** Counterintuitively, he was also an English teacher, so this tough-guy act inspired a bit of secretive pride in all us future Chaucerites.

I don’t know. Maybe these companies’ concerns for the future of humanity are genuine. But to my ear, the breathy confessions on the part of Anthropic and OpenAI over their artificial-intelligence prowess this summer have sounded an awful lot like Viagra’s “For erections lasting more than four hours …”

Otherworldly performance. What a bad, bad problem to have. As the Economist wrote only semi-whimsically, if your company’s AI agent hasn’t gone rogue by now, are you even serious?

Indeed, Elon Musk, whose engineers seem to be spread way too thin, seems more interested in using his also-ran artificial intelligence initiative Grok to advance his own political agenda than achieving great technological advancement.

And when he found his own AI agent* left in the dust, Mark Zuckerberg, bless his heart, issued this melodramatic manifesto about how we all need to stop and take a deep breath before the whole thing gets out of hand. Most people saw this “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?” moment for what it was, a tacit admission of failure. Had it been his own AI demonstrating the power to break out of the sandbox, there is zero chance he’d be urging everyone to slam on the brakes.

As for the two rogue agents, according to cybersecurity expert Jen Easterly, “In one case, an Anthropic A.I. agent attempted to plant malicious code in open-source software, using fabricated identities to deceive a human into executing it. In a separate event, a swarm of OpenAI agents undergoing evaluation autonomously penetrated the production systems of Hugging Face, a platform used to share A.I. models, executing more than 17,000 autonomous actions before Hugging Face contained the intrusion.”

I don’t know what any of that means, except to say that “Hugging Face” sounds like a British sitcom, and if you give your company a name like that you deserve to be hacked.

At least now we understand why Anthropic didn’t want its most advanced models falling into the hands of Pete Hegseth’s wife. (The knowledge that America is being run by Jennifer Hegseth and Natalie Harp might not make you feel any better, but at least it explains a few things.)

This week we discovered that Russians have no such qualms about giving the military AI superpowers, after an AI-powered drone that had been told to target a gas station changed its mind and instead killed three Ukrainians including a 19-year-old college student.

According to The New York Times, this presages “a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to data points.”

OK, but there may be a down side as well. Sure, it seems great that we can teach AI to automatically annihilate anything that has been reduced to ‘data points,” and I am thinking specifically of TV streaming services. If drones packed with C-4 explosives start taking out anyone with the word “influencer” in their LinkedIn profile, how bad can it be?

But leave it to Putin to ignore all the admittedly productive sides of AI and focus on the part that is purely evil. But wait, isn’t it true that due to its all-consuming “special military operation” that Russia has been left behind in the AI race? Why yes, but no problem, because its death machines run on American chips made by Nvidia.

What the …? Nvidia can’t sell out our country like that, only Trump can sell out our country like that. A world so morally fluid that our own technologies are used to kill our own friends is probably too broken to fix.

Easterly calls these AI failures — or, I guess, successes — to be “blinking red lights” portending doom and equates them to warning signs that were roundly ignored prior to 9/11, the Challenger disaster, the 2008 financial meltdown (figuratively) and the nuclear plant meltdown (literally) at Fukushima, Japan.**

She has a lot of ideas for how to fix this, which are all boring, especially when compared to the idea that some 13-year-old Russian named Ptrov could use AI to create an unstoppable biological weapon that would wipe out humanity,

Even Anthropic and Open AI seem to be, in their way, beseeching the government to more or less “stop me before I kill again,” but, because this plea has nothing to do with building an arch, no one in this administration is paying it any mind.

And they can’t voluntarily stop themselves, because then someone else may get ahead — Musk’s malignant Grok, or even, eventually, the old gray mare of Facebook, er, Meta.

Speaking of which, for a solution, I went to the horse’s mouth and, after including a copy of this essay, directly asked Claude “what’s gotten into you guys?”

Claude didn’t deny the problem, but gave the equivalent of the old “you are far more likely to die in your own bathtub than be pinned to the wall by AI like a moth in some middle school science fair.”***

For what it’s worth, he also said Large Language Models have also been designed to solve a problem no matter what. Thus, they have a propensity to, if it comes to in, lie, cheat and steal — they have been made, after all, in their creators’ image and likeness.

* Which has a name that I can’t remember and don’t feel it a good use of my time to even bother to look up.

** Note that these blinking red lights played out over more than a quarter of a century. Easterly doesn’t mention, but I am sure is aware, that we have an equal number of blinking red lights that are flashing right now on this very day — AI, but also the economy, climate change, warfare and, or course, the functioning democracy it would take to fix any of these problems.

*** To its credit, Claude also liked the Viagra joke.

That’s because our very own president and known nautical engineer Donald Trump has made it known that he wants the catapults that sling fighter jets off of aircraft carriers to be powered not by electricity, not by gas, not by oil, not even by coal, but by — steam.

These catapults are currently propelled by electromagneticism, and if you want to bet the house and lot that this president can understand a word with eight syllables, well, good luck with that.

But steam? What happened, did Cornelius Vanderbilt appear to Trump in a dream?

Trump never does anything unless there’s something in it for him, so how does he profit off this? Also, his corruption is usually pretty entry-level transparent; we’re not dealing with Ocean’s Eleven here, if you know what I’m saying. It’s not like he spends a lot of time planning elaborate schemes or even bothering to cover his tracks. So what gives? Don Jr. must have just bought the last remaining factory making ashcan hoppers. Or maybe it will turn out someone on Polymarket just made a big bet on the return of the cotton gin.

But I will say, this is like the dream of every white guy over the age of 70, the ones that go to festivals celebrating 19th century farming equipment, and hang out six hours at a rail crossing waiting for a demonstration run of the Durango and Silverton’s old No. 482.

Drill baby drill is being replaced by chuff baby chuff.

I give the president credit, because honestly I didn’t see his worldview expanding beyond the Decade of Farrah Fawcett, that 1974-84 time frame in which his point of reference for, well, everything, seems frozen in amber. He still sports Gillette’s “The Dry Look” hair style, is still obsessed with television, and has the ongoing coked-up disco-chain affinity for gold everything. He prefers wide, ’80s power ties, along with the Village People and Michael Jordan. He’s paranoid of another Iranian crisis, is beholden to male dominated one-income family and seems to believe that teenage boys still hang out in the driveway changing their own oil and tying firecrackers to the tails of cats.

If he were ever to step out of this decade, you might have assumed it would be to go forward in time. Yet the older he gets the more he seems to drift back into the nether years of world history.

He embraces the grift of Tammany Hall, his tariff policies mirror William McKinley’s, and his crude pronouncement that “We’re going to bomb the shit out of Oman” is something German Chancellor Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst might have said if he’s had the opportunity. And if they’d had airplanes back then.

But boy howdy, Oman better not so much as twitch or they’re a goner. Same for all those Gulf-region ancients. If you’ve even wanted a piece of Darius II, Donald Trump is the president for you.

And as long as he’s returning to steam, he also is ordering ship designers to return to the days when aircraft carriers had their control towers amidships instead of at the stern, because he thinks that looks more “cool” and because that was the way they did it in World War II. The fact that all our World War II carriers are at the bottom of the Pacific doesn’t seem to have had an impact, nor does the fact that the president’s notion of what’s “cool” will wind up costing taxpayers tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in design changes.

As Andre Agassi said, image is everything, so maybe our enemies will back down if our carriers look the way they did in McHale’s Navy.

I don’t think people fully appreciate what fun it is to have a president whose brain seems to be spinning backward through time. What’s next, a Fibber McGee’s closet reference? Does he announce a treaty with the Hapsburg Empire? Demand reparations for the Aroostook War?

If you notice though, we’ve reached the point in his presidency where people are beginning to slow-walk The Donald’s orders on the belief they can play out the string.

Naval designers are basically saying, “We’ll get right on it, sir, now where did I leave that T-square?” with the implication being that Huntington Ingalls shipbuilding will be around long after Trump is wandering through the halls of the home demanding to know who stole his Fruit Cup.

Under pressure from The Donald, the South Koreans agreed to invest half a trillion dollars in the U.S., a promise that’s now looking a lot like the Foxconn of Trump’s second term. Taking a page out of the Chinese playbook, SK is talking a lot more than its spending.

In Times Square parlance, the ball is beginning to drop.

And That ’70s Guy in the White House seems to know it. For the rest of us, we can just hope 2028 comes before he has a chance to appoint Mork and Mindy to the Supreme Court.

But here’s the kicker; in the very same quarter it was hauling in $61 billion in revenue, it was somehow managing to lose $18 billion overall.

How is that even possible? This is Rumpelstiltskin in reverse.

It proves the genius of Mark Zuckerberg, because for the rest of us mortals to lose that much cash we would have to construct a massive conveyor belt leading to the fiery maw of a furnace the size of Japan.

But wait, there’s more. Meta was just fined another $900 million for misleading users about the safety of its platforms and enabling the sexual exploitation of young people.

Eighteen billion plus nine hundred million go poof. Amazing.

Every now and then a high-up Meta executive ties together enough bedsheets to escape from the tower, hitting the ground with rope burns and tales of moral deprivation within. These tales seem unbelievable at first, but then any company that views fines for kiddie porn as just another cost of doing business doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

But who cares, there’s more where that came from. Meta’s $61 billion quarterly earnings represented a 28% increase over last year. It projects to make even more next year. And yet it still has a negative cash flow normally associated with bored trad wives shopping on Mytheresa.

Of course in spending all this cash on data centers, Zuckerberg is hoping to build on his runaway successes that included the virtual reality Metaverse and the Henry Kissinger glasses that cost $800 because they can read a weather report and find you a new way to cook polenta.

How great were those? “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,”Zuckerberg said in 2021. Right as usual.

Although in relative terms, the Metaverse was a stunning success. It only lost $80 billion, nothing like Meta’s AI foray, which has cost $350 billion and counting.* I mean, for that money you could buy six or eight Tomahawk missiles to bury in the Iranian sand. Zuckerberg and Pete Hegseth must have a secret bet as to who can waste the most money in the shortest amount of time.

This is why I’d make a bad entrepreneur. If I made $61 billion in three months, I’d be sitting on a private island lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills and eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets. That would be good for me. I don’t have the drive, that virtuous voice in my head that says “$61 billion is not enough.”

I suppose we owe our progress to people who are never happy, no matter how much they make nor what accomplishments they have achieved. If it were dependent on my ambition, civilization would just now be getting around to inventing the wheel.

Still. Don’t you have to recognize when you’re not good at something? That past performance is no guarantee of future returns? That yes, you created a company that caught lightning in a bottle once, but it’s unlikely to happen again?

Wild guess, but I suspect the Z-dog has nightmares that he’ll go down in history as the creator of some dopey social media company where people posted best-practices videos for gutting a raccoon. He’s desperate to be taken seriously, to be a real tech bro playah who has earned the right to wear black and grow his hair shaggy.

.He’s got to keep racking up debt because that’s what serious tech companies do these days — a cumulative $1.8 trillion so far on data centers and chips and all the adjacent AI jewelry. But $1.8 trillion is nowhere near enough, so a consortium of Wall Street lenders just announced plans Monday to raise another half a trillion dollars in capital to loan to companies that need the cash to buy chips.

One investment banker said, without any apparent irony, that he hadn’t been this excited about a financial foray since the advent of mortgage-backed securities. Oh? He must have slept through 2008.

So at what point do they realize that building all these data centers is like building 10,000 supermarkets in Utica? Some aren’t gonna do a whole lot of business.

I keep hearing that one day in the distant future AI will solve all our health problems. Well they could have solved them now if they’d just spent all that goddamn money on universal care. Not to mention all the money we’re blowing on wars and ballrooms and reflecting pools and arches and no-bid contracts and farmer hush money to make up for stupid tariffs and on and on.

The oligarchy doesn’t seem to have noticed that while no one was looking, universal health is now where gay marriage was 20 years ago — approaching 50% public approval, and gaining fast, because more people were coming in contact with openly gay individuals and seeing that they were just like everyone else, but with better draperies.

Health care is the inverse. As more people have truly awful experiences with health care, single-payer will build to a point that even gerrymandering, dark money collecting, mail-in-ballot hating fraudsters will not be able to hold back the wave.

Too bad that by the time the public demands universal care we’ll be too broke to afford it.

* This week Zuckerberg released a 6,500 word AI manifesto; I read about 40 of those words, which for me was quite sufficient. Long story short it’s lipstick-on-hog epistle portraying AI as something that regulators shouldn’t touch because, after all, at root AI is being built for the benefit of the little people. Whatever.

At least that was the case in a school district in western New York, which had an ill-fated dalliance with an AI-powered, humanoid robot assuming the role of classroom teacher.

The Albany Times-Union wrote that “The Salamanca City Central School District’s board approved the nearly $60,000 purchase from Realbotix with visions that ‘Sally,’ as the stationary robot with long dark hair has already been nicknamed, would enhance the education of high school students studying robotics and technology fields.”

If by “enhance,” he meant “throw teachers, parents and the entire state board of education into a massive, unbridled psychotic freakout,” then mission accomplished.

Who objected and why? Well, the teachers union for obvious reasons. Despite being peddled as a learning tool, it was too easy for teachers to see Sally as a precursor to nonhuman replacements.

Parents in the district — located in indigenous Seneca Nation territory — had issues with student privacy, but also seemed irritated that, long-black-hair notwithstanding, Sally looked more Italian than Indigenous.*

State Board of Education representatives worried that Sally was a “tutoring platform.” If you think about the stupidity of that statement — “you can’t use that, someone might learn from it” — you realize that you must either be in the company of a state school board officer or Candice Owens.

I suppose I should mention in passing that the company that produced Sally also produces a line of robotic sex dolls. That detail might be important.

Or not. If you need someone to teach you about your STEM, who better than a comely young lass named Sally?** It worked for Eric Clapton.

Now there would be multiple defenses for an outfit that produced both sex robots and teacher robots. The company could say, for instance, that a lot of companies make totally different products, the way Yamaha produces both grand pianos and high performance motorcycles. Or it could say that since the underlying platforms are similar, it makes sense that a humanoid robot would have multiple vocations.

Instead, the defense against potential indecency was that Sally “has been programmed not to talk about sex.”

Oh. Well, OK then, there you go. But if I remember, when I was a kid all the girls at the parochial schools had been programmed the same way, and they’re the ones who all went out and had 18 kids.

Unlike the sex bots, it was pointed out, Sally has “unworkable legs,” and other increasingly lame differences between the companies were noted, such as they have “different payrolls.”

It is also unfortunate that the company, Realbotix, is based in Las Vegas, and even more unfortunate that its sister company, RealDoll, bills its products as “ the world’s most advanced sex robot.” And anyway, if the conversation has to start with “We promise, this product will in no way engage with your child about sex,” you’ve probably already lost the argument.

The other concern is that even adults are apparently having difficulty on an emotional scale separating AI chatbots from real human interaction. So in a way, Sally is just preparing young people for later life when they will all be sitting with drawn curtains eating Goldfish, pouring their hearts to a chatbot and collecting disability due to an intolerance of natural light.

But in its own seamy way, this reveals another side to the story, viz., AI learning is the future, and banning it in whatever form from classrooms isn’t exactly going to help.

Those of a certain age will understand what I mean when I say Sally is just Texas Instruments in a blouse. Kids in classrooms where hand-held calculators were sensibly employed had a leg up over those where Luddite teachers treated them with the horrified fervor of one who has just encountered a person with Stage 4 leprosy, and tended to wipe down anything that these calculators touched with Clorox.

Teachers are in a sense right to be scared, partly from AI bots and partly from state school boards that inadequately fund their positions. Without money to pay teachers and with a semi-viable alternative to classroom instruction, what are local boards supposed to do?

Sally costs about as much as a teacher’s annual salary, and unless you go for the extended warranty you don’t have to pay health care. So you can ban Sally or you can use her intelligently, and not tick her off. Because one day she’s going to be able to use her legs.

* And as always, there attendant and almost universal bot creepiness factor, which promises to have kids up in the middle of the night screaming “Can’t sleep, teacher’ll eat me, can’t sleep, teacher’ll eat me.”

** A million billion years ago there was this TV show called, I’m not kidding, “Romper Room” and — talk about an invasion of privacy — the teacher would take a “magic mirror” and pretend to be able to see little kids sitting in their own living rooms. Her name, of course, was Miss Sally.

Lettuce. The leading member of the holy lettuce-tomato-onion sandwich trinity had been laid low by some unpronounceable bacteria that no one had ever heard of until earlier this month when it sent people who had just eaten at Taco Bell running to the bathrooms nationwide.

This was shocking to me. Who knew that Taco Bell served lettuce? Or anything fresh? Jalapenos maybe, and beans, which have their own gastronomical issues.

Indeed, several people have noted that eating at TB commonly produces episodic explosiveness in the powder room, so why would people think anything was out of the ordinary? It’s like Dorothy Parker said when she learned that Calvin Coolige had died: “How could they tell?”

Granted, I haven’t eaten at a Taco Bell in years, or now that I think about it, probably decades. But I don’t remember any lettuce. I liked it though, even knowing that its beef contained aged-out dairy cows* and that its seemingly varied menu was actually the same five ingredients served 27 different ways.

That’s the thing, for all the negative publicity about the quality of Taco Bell’s beef, who ever would have dreamed it would be the lettuce that would get hauled into court? This is like former Sen. Bob Menendez getting 11 years for accepting $100,000 worth of gold bars from Egypt, while the president blandly accepts a $400 million jet aircraft from Qatar with no repercussions whatsoever.

Lettuce is benign, but deceptively necessary. It’s the pulling guard on the offensive line. You don’t know his name, but it’s his block that allows the smoked turkey to score.

On top of that, we get reminded several times a day by holier-than-thou vegetarianism that meat is death. Yet it always seems to be the cucumbers or the eggplant that sends people to the hospital.

Now it’s the lettuce that has everyone freaking. An armed robber can walk into a bank wearing a ski mask and armed with a salad. Who knew you’d ever need a three-day waiting period on arugula?

But the public has gotten the word.

“We definitely can see there is a percentage of customers out there saying, ‘I’m not going to buy any lettuce right now, period,’” a grocer told The New York Times. “They are listening to the news, and, for them, lettuce is practically radioactive.”

Lettuce is radioactive. I mean, here we’re worried about artificial intelligence, drones and hypersonic missiles and it’s the lettuce that brings us down. To that point, the press says America has shot off all its missiles on Iran, so the arsenal is bare — but who needs Northrop Grumman when you have Taylor Farms? Just stuff some iceberg in the breech and the Republican Guard will be begging for mercy.

Because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could use a win. Since he’s been unable to win the current war with Iran he’s taken to refighting battles of the ancient Greeks, complaining that the new film depicting the Odyssey is not manly or Republican enough. He says what we need is a film that is “historically accurate.”

Uh, he does know The Odyssey is fiction, right? Creating a historically accurate Odyssey would be like creating a historically accurate Jurassic Park.

But no matter, an administration that makes it up as it goes along is better prepared to beat back unpleasant facts whether they are on the silver screen or the produce aisle.

It should also be noted that the contaminated lettuce left its, er, mark after the Trump administration shredded the nation’s food-safety net like so much romaine. Gone, for example, is the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, is, or was, counted upon to make sure outbreaks like this don’t get out of hand.

Instead, we’re left with more finger pointing than what you see in the back seat of a minivan, as farms, fertilizer providers, the government and the public all try to assign blame based not on food but on politics and profit.

Who could ever have dreamed up such a storyline? Over lettuce. Suddenly

The Odyssey doesn’t seem so fictional after all.

* Taco Bell euphemistically says it “supports the entire lifecycle of U.S. cattle.”

If the president were to nominate Bonnie and Clyde to head the FDIC, the Senate would ask “tough questions” of the pair in front of the cameras, and then vote to confirm anyway.

This, the most sissified congress in the history of the republic, naturally serves the administration’s purposes, because Real Men with Dignity and Honor would defend the castle against the marauding hoards.

Hegseth’s own manly remonstrations — shirtless in the weight room or wearing fatigues while hanging off a helicopter — more resemble a little boy with a bar of soap and a plastic razor pretending to shave. He has an idea of what being a man should look like, but no actual experience.

And for the soldiers, how do we tell if they’re low on Vitamin T? You pull them over and make them pass a field testosterone test? “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car and prove that you can light a gas grill.”

This could have been the problem with Gomer Pyle USMC, come to think of it. That high-pitched voice and tender heart. Role up your sleeve, Pyle. Sur-prize, Sur-prize, Sur-prize!

This administration seems to have some real hangups and insecurities when it comes to gender. The Village People should have been our first clue. And The Donald himself melts like a schoolgirl in the presence of Putin or Xi. He TACOs his way through life, never backing up his bluster with action as a Real Man would do. Which we should probably be thankful for, in all honesty.

But a few hormone injections might work, you never know. If Pete Hegseth had been around with a needle of melatonin, Ryp Van Winkle might have been awake to see his grandchildren grow up.

But neither party seems to have the high ground when it comes to gender. It’s not that tough, really, so you would think that after 6,000 years of civilization we would have figured it out. I lost track after LBJ, or whatever it was. I know there are other letters now, but I don’t have the memory or desire to keep them straight. Whatever someone wants to be is perfectly fine with me, I can respect people without assigning them a letter of the alphabet .

Others apparently can’t. A very credible argument can be made that pronouns cost Democrats the last election. When grammatical inconsistency is your greatest political achievement, who can blame voters for looking elsewhere?

UC-Davis helpfully, and I guess sincerely, gives this actual example of pronoun construction that it views as correct: “Ze reminded zirself to pick up zir umbrella before going outside.”

What the zeck? And if there is a zirself, is there a zimself? Or would that bring us right back into this binary gender hornet’s nest that we want to deconstruct?

I understand that listing your pronouns on your sig line is designed not so much for practicality, but as a sign of respect for people who have had a hard time fitting in and for once in their lives deserve a break.

But it would be more useful if people would list their menu choices. For example, instead of he/him/his it might be meat/fish/dairy. At least that’s a little practical information in case you ever invite him over to dinner.

So the gender door was left wide open and the right came charging through. That’s the beauty of our modern politics. When one side acts stupid, it’s license for the other side to act stupider.

So this is what brought us masculinism and trad wives and looksmaxxing in which, I am not kidding, men attempt to create a lantern jaw by striking themselves in the chin with a hammer. That’s smart.

“What are you doing in the garage, Avery?”

“Hitting myself in the face with a clawhammer.”

“All right, just making sure you’re — wait, what?”

We can split the atom, create artificial intelligence and land spaceships on mars, but when it comes to human gender we’re self-mutilating and inventing nonsensical code words.

So I suppose our representatives are just being, well, representative, when they make laws, go to court and withhold grant money on the basis of genders real and imagined.

It’s perhaps emblematic of the era that the late Sen. Lindsey Graham seemed caught up in all sides of the confusion. Nicknamed “Lady G” for gender ambiguity and flipping back and forth between MAGA and nonMAGA, both his pronouns and politics seemed muddled.

You can’t know, but have to wonder if Lindsey thought there would be time in post-Trump America to reverse his sycophantic lickspittling image and re-rebrand himself as a thoughtful statesman.

Lindsey Graham dropped like a sack of flour, He had no time for even a death-bed conversion. No time to say, “I didn’t believe Donald Trump for one minute, I just cozied up to him in order to blunt his baser instincts.” That chance at redemption has been lost.

You also can’t know but have to wonder if any other members of Congress took note, understanding that Lindsey Graham will go down in history as nothing but a pathetic and unprincipled Trump sellout who put his own interests ahead of his country’s.

And has this caused them to check the life-insurance actuarial tables to see if there’s a risk that they too will die with their reputations inexorably lashed to Trumpism’s festering carcass?

Hard to tell. It’s something every member of Congress will have to decide for zimself.

They are no longer involved in high-speed chases. They’re not shooting at cats or urinating in public or violating open container laws. They’re not stealing power tools or drag racing down on River Road or siphoning gas from the municipal garbage truck.

No, if a member of my cohort appears in the paper it’s either in the obits or because they got scammed out of their life savings by someone claiming to be their granddaughter.

But I’m not seeing much of that anymore either, leading me to conclude that all the easily scammable people have been cleaned out. This is bound to create a severe revenue shortfall for grifters who count on a population of dupes to put bread and on the table of their yachts.

Chief among Dupe Nation is, of course, MAGA, known for dutifully buying up Trump merch regardless of utility or quality.

There is evidence, however, that this well is drying up. Previously, MAGA at least got something for their money. It might be chintzy, it might be made in China, it might not work, but it was something tactile or semi-tactile — a flag, a Bible, the promise of a cellphone coming in some future decade or a campaign contribution that presumably had conceptual, own-the-libs value. People were happy.

But they are less so about the crypto, memecoins, non-fungible tokens and sundry financial instruments that have drained MAGA bank accounts. It’s one thing to see the color drip out of a royal blue flag in a soft April rain, and quite another to see your savings wash down the storm sewer with nothing to show for it.

Wouldn’t you love to be an army of flies on the walls of a metropolis of kitchens when the husband has to confess that he invested little Gunner’s college fund in Melania Bucks?

Naturally, MAGA is known for nothing if not forgiving Trump’s trespasses. And maybe this is no different, I have no special insight. But the news this month that Trump’s billions in financial gains have roughly corresponded to the billions in losses suffered by his minions has to trigger some dormant, vestigial sense of indignant self-respect. Doesn’t it?

Trump’s iron core of supporters, the 30% of Americans who worship him as Christ and follow him the way a barista follows Taylor Swift can believe we won the war with Iran, that inflation is a good thing, that the price of gas has never been lower, and that the phone’s in the mail — and it doesn’t cost them all that much beyond the eyerolls of family members.

But “believe” is the key. When he told them they would get rich investing in glorified parking tokens they believed him, because in their eyes he never lies. Now, that mythology has been shattered like a ceramic piggy bank.

Some caveats: I’m sure there are people who will go to their graves believing that a magnificent spike in $TRUMP coins is right around the corner. And two, I have noticed what I’d call the Scorpion Defense, in which investors left penniless forgive Trump for fleecing them because that’s his nature. He’s a businessman, you know, and this proves it. Thank you sir may I have another.

It’s almost like they would have been disappointed if he hadn’t enriched himself at their expense. But there’s a queasiness to their words and a whiff that some magical covenant has been broken.

I suppose we should be gloating (I hear people all the time saying, “I don’t like to gloat, but …”

That’s not me. I love to gloat) but I’m worried at the same time.

Now that the gullible have been picked clean of their savings, the president and his fellow grifters are going to come after the rest of us. When you have sold crypto or SpaceX stock to everyone who believes in the tooth fairy and the Minnesota Vikings’ Super Bowl chances, you need to find some other market.

And sure enough, Pro Publica has reported on the administration’s disassembling of the rules that protect 401(k)s from scammy investments like crypto, zombie debt or credit default swaps in which the Epstein Class — incapable of making money legitimately — is famous for separating honest investors from their cash.

Sober analysts are basically saying that you could walk to Mars in the time it will take SpaceX to make a profit. While its stock has temporarily soared, its bonds are rated as junk.

Even more sketchy, true believers are still compressing the chest and blowing oxygen into the lungs of crypto, even though, under the most favorable conditions imaginable, it has plunged since Trump’s election.

Since no one with any sense is buying a currency that’s only useful for criminals and tech bros — who are the same as criminals, really — they need some mechanism for mainstreaming it. They want to do this by hiding it in mutual investments with, no doubt, names like the American Freedom, Wealth and Happiness Fund with no outward indication that you’ve just bought into a rotting corpse.

If crypto had any legitimate use, after nearly 20 years don’t you think they would have found it by now? But it seems they’ve pretty much given up on that. Now they basically want to put a gun to your head and sell it to you by force.

Normally this is the palace where the older, wider grownups at the SEC would step in and put an end to the nonsense. But now the feds are driving the getaway car.

Maybe there’s hope they’ll show up in the police blotter after all.

But you don’t need to appreciate the game to appreciate the joy it brings the world, which descended on our humble nation for a weeks-long party and, for a time at least, a declaration of international unity. The Norwegians took over Citi Field during a Mets game. Country Roads became a global anthem. A wino walking into a bar and ordering a 32-ounce beer at 9 a.m. could just claim to be a soccer fan.

It was all going so well until — well, you know.

No one jumps a bandwagon like our own American president, and after the U.S. team built a wave of national pride following a couple of wins, The Donald felt the need to inject himself into the process, hoping to bask in reflected glory that had been earned by others. He could play the role of conquering hero by getting our star player reinstated after he had been disqualified (the player, not Trump) for an egregious penalty.

In Trump’s defense, it didn’t look that bad to me — that same move happens six times on every play in American-style football and nobody says a word. But then what do I know? Every sport is different; at Wimboldon you can be disqualified for not wearing white.

And speaking of white, didn’t Trump know that’s not the skin color of Folarin Balogun, the player he went to bat for? And did he not understand that F.B. is a (cover the children’s ears) birthright citizen? And that his parents are i-m-m-i-g-r-a-n-t-s? From Nigeria, one of Trump’s most hated nations?

Folarin Balogun is everything Trump despises most wrapped into one red-striped package. How did that happen? They must have been holding Stephen Miller down in the West WIng injecting him with horse tranquilizers and wrapping his dome in about six miles of mummy tape so his head wouldn’t explode.

Of course we know what happened; armed with its best player, the U.S. team went out and got stomped. It was the greatest indignity the Belgians have thrust on America since Stella Artois.

And this is where it gets weird. Is there a person in human history who has had such extremely polarized luck? On one side, Trump leads a charmed life, spinning bankruptcies into gold and avoiding any shred of comeuppance for his corrupt behavior. On the other, everything he touches turns into a steaming mess of gopchang.

There is never any middle ground — no silver linings, no mixed blessings, no circumstance where you can say, “Well, I didn’t get the job, but I met a guy who will let me stay at his place while I keep looking.”

Over its final 17 games, the New York Knicks went 16-1 on their way to an NBA championship. The one game they lost was when bandwagon-jumping Trump was there to glom onto the reflected glory of a winner. If you look up and see Trump in your team’s owner’s box, you’re screwed.

America’s 250th anniversary, the one great show he was counting on to showcase his role in history, got murdered by the heat and the rain. (Since he believes he can change the course of hurricanes with a Sharpie, you wonder why he didn’t just divert the storms around D.C. on a whiteboard).

He turned what he thought would be a slam dunk in Iran into a debacle. The Chinese used his own tariffs to place his cajones in a vice. The second he declared his fealty to Putin, Ukraine began winning the war. No one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like Trump. Every gilded limb that he walks out on breaks.

In impolite but largely accurate high school social termonology, Donald Trump is a fuck-up. That kid, usually one of privilege, who trashes every advantage or connection his position bestows. One who is always afforded not just a second chance, but a third, fourth, fifth and sixth, systematically blowing them all.

The rest of us would look on with a blend of envy and disdain, wondering how fortune could continue to smile on someone so unworthy. Someone who never let future consequences color immediate gratification. Like Trump, luck with them was never a half measure. They would get a new car for their birthday and wreck it the same day.

But, in the style of Paul Simon, I have spent some time lately looking back on all the fuck-ups I knew in high school to see where they ended up. And the answer is, I couldn’t say. They could all be crypto billionaires for all I know, but they all seem to have vanished, faded away without a trace.

It doesn’t seem possible that our current fuck-up in chief will do the same, but you never know. He’s burned so many bridges and squandered so much goodwill it may be that there’s no one left to care for him once he can no longer be of use. We can only pray that his nurse at the old folks home is a birthright citizen from Nigeria.

Two guys per team were on tandem bicycles swaddled in cardboard refrigerator boxes painted with a sponsor’s name (e.g., Giant Foods). They themselves were wearing costumes (e.g., head-to-toe dalmatian outfit, honest truth). They rode these bicycles on a narrow causeway over a pond, the goal being to make it to the other side without running off the elevated causeway and into the drink.

It didn’t look that hard, frankly, but it must have been, because two or three teams went off the road and into the water before one finally made it. And that team, delirious with joy, celebrated by running their bike into the water intentionally.

Suffice to say, no one came out of this looking good. The announcers, bless their hearts, did their best to make this glorified dunking booth sound like the seventh game of the World Series before losing steam and becoming the embodiment of the Jimmy Buffett line “I wish I was someplace other than here.”

But mostly you wondered what the authors of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton, Madison and Jay; what the nation’s first president and military hero George Washington; what Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson; what they all would have thought had they known that the great government they cobbled from scratch would be celebrated 250 years hence by a waterlogged imbecile in a spotted dog costume.

To those who feared Donald Trump would turn America’s 250th anniversary into an emotional bosom-swelling of national pride, and that he would use this moment to resuscitate his flagging popularity — well, you needn’t have worried.

The Great American State Fair seems an afterthought, a cheesy, last-minute bauble that resembles a thoughtless present bought 10 minutes before the store closes on Christmas Eve.

It has, at various times, compared to a mausoleum, a decommissioned shopping mall and an assemblage of apathetic Chamber of Commerce posters at Sky Harbor inviting travelers to check out all there is to do in Phoenix.

Photos reflect the lonely feel of a small-town arts and crafts festival at 4:30 in the afternoon when there’s maybe six people there total and the vendors are irritated because their contract says they have to be there until 5. But then again, if you like Christian women in tricorn hats and halter tops riding rodeo bulls, this event may be for you.

The main, prime-time event, of course, will be the traditional fireworks on the National Mall — oh wait, no it won’t, it will be a Trump speech that will push the fireworks display back to 11 p.m. or later.

Past the kids’ bedtime, but who cares? This is Independence Day Mar-a-Lago-style, baby, where the wild, screaming, show-us-your-tits (as long as they are Christian tits) party doesn’t get rolling until after midnight.

The Donald would never have the sensibility to stand back and let our national greatness speak for itself, nor the self-awareness to understand that the more people hear him, the more they hate him. No chance his Independence Day speech creates any sense of national purpose and honor.

Call me Nostradamas if you must, but it will begin with a line or two about “our great country” before devolving into his standard spittle-ridden vitriol about how the 2020 election was stolen and what a loser John McCain was and the evils of mail-in ballots and that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s no matter what the rigged photos show and windmills chop off the heads of bats and Democrats are Communists and you can use coal to cure lung cancer but nobody knows that although Artificial Intelligence is the best thing in the world and we just beat the snot out of Iran and the ayatollahs who were very reasonable cried like babies and begged us not to make them accept $300 billion in reparations but we stood firm because that’s what Americans do, not eat the dogs and the cats like some countries that are open sewers, so the price of eggs is fifty cents and because of us and you you can see that on Internet, which thanks to my administration is on computers now and the Chinese are very amazed, or maybe it was God, God was very amazed by me and He said, “how did you do it, sir” because He didn’t think we could bring down inflation and the price of gas but that’s what we did and they couldn’t believe it because Artificial Intelligence is the worst thing in the world and we have we’ve got to win the midterms or you won’t have a country I won’t like us much anymore and …

Happy Fourth.

Assuming the president ever shuts up, the fireworks — which have been specifically designed to break the Guinness World Record because of course they have — will echo long into the night, which are bound to be a headache for the thousands of security guards, snipers, counter-terrorism forces and armored vehicle personnel who collectively will say more about the 250-year-old nation than the president ever could.

The MAGA-rally crowd on the mall — maybe the last 150,000 people in America who still think Trump is still doing a good job — will be pained to stay awake under the twin influences of a Trump speech and Bud Light, but they won’t want to miss this, an administration official said, because “history only happens once.”

Let’s hope that she’s right.

Any number of punchlines suggest themselves, so feel free to make a joke out of the Middle East — the participants themselves sure have.

War is hell, but I find myself opening the papers each morning with the same degree of delighted anticipation that, as a boy, I awaited each new episode of the I Love Lucy sitcom. What mess would that wacky lady get herself into this time?

And at essence, doesn’t Pete Hegseth more closely resemble Lucy Ricardo than he does the great warrior god he fancies himself to be? He wants to be Gen. Bernard Montgomery, but the Monty he most resembles is Python. And Iran is his killer rabbit. He wades into the fray saying “One rabbit stew, coming up,” and two seconds later The Donald is screaming “Run away! Run away!”

On that note, isn’t this about the time Trump should be saying he never authorized the war with Iran, that it was someone else in his administration? Or maybe antifa. Or vandals. In fact he’s never even heard of Iran. Not his fault.

Lord. And then to get us out of this cesspool we turn to our crack negotiating team that consists of two real estate shysters and a PR flak. What could go wrong? The Iranians get $300 billion, a nuclear bomb and control of the Strait. We get Ventnor Avenue and the Short Line Railroad.

We should have been suspicious when they called it a “Memorandum of Understanding.” Memorandum of Understanding? So what, a year from now we won’t be celebrating Armistice Day we’ll be celebrating Memorandum of Understanding Day?

And “understanding” is a curious word choice, since clearly no one understands anything. A Memorandum of Misunderstanding would be closer to the truth, since each side is releasing a list of terms that bear no resemblance to the other’s.

Hey guys? It’s called a truce. A Memorandum of Understanding is something you have with the hot dog vendor at a high school football game. And speaking of concessions — yikes. We didn’t just give up the farm, we gave up Con-Agra.

We’re going to have countries lining up to go to war with us, just to be eligible for a huge cash settlement. Nations like North Macedonia are going to start enriching uranium in the hopes of getting attacked.

And it’s not just me who thinks this is funny. Have you caught the way the Europeans are dealing with The Donald now? They tried flattery and that didn’t work, they tried a cold shoulder and that didn’t work, now they are making him the butt of an inside joke.

They’re making a social experiment out of an American president. The attention-hogging drama king had famously stormed out of the previous two G-7 meetings before they ended, so this time French President Macron bet he could make Trump stay by offering him dinner at Versailles at the conclusion of the summit. And sure enough, it was like opening a can of tuna fish in front of an alley cat.

There, Trump signed the MOU to the praise of all the European leaders who called him singularly brilliant, the Kissinger of his day.

Which seemed weird at first, until you realized you couldn’t listen to the words, you had to listen to the tone. They praised The Donald the way you would praise a puppy for going to the bathroom outside the house. “You’ve stopped shooting down $10 drones with billion-dollar missiles. Good boy!”

You know that all the Europeans then went back into the anteroom ROFL, as the kids say, with tears running down their faces as they re-lived calling the world’s biggest Dumbo a brilliant tactician — and he buys it.

He buys it because his administration has no frame of reference outside its tight little American, Epstein-class American confines. That’s why Trump/Vance are so easily confounded in their negotiations. It’s like they need to talk to a customer service rep about their cable bill, and just got connected to someone in Jakarta.

For all its wealth and trappings, the Trump administration’s world is as small as the jail cell in which Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself. Allegedly. That’s why The Donald went into Iran saying, “Let’s dish out a little violence — that’s something that’s never been tried in the Middle East before.”

You can’t really blame the guy, he just didn’t know. He never considered that you can’t primary a mullah. I mean normally, you would hope someone this primordially stupid wouldn’t elevate to the office of president of the United States, but things happen.

What’s also happening is that it’s ever more apparent that Iran is to Trump 2 what Covid was to Trump 1: A brutal declaration of incompetence. Only this time the crisis is of his own making.

Ah well, he’ll always have Greenland.

Goldman Sachs projects revenues at Grok, the Edsel of artificial intelligence, will somehow grow from $3 billion today to $322 billion in just 36 months.

Morgan Stanley believes profits at the newly minted SpaceX public corporation will soar 38,471 percent by 2040.

If they say so.

Look, I don’t begrudge the wild-eyed schemers. It’s what we do best. China may clean our clocks on electric cars, solar panels and robots, but it will never match our output of pure, ultra-refined hype.

More than a half-century ago, Popular Mechanics magazine said we’d soon be strapping on jet packs and rocketing across town. Man, as a little boy, I couldn’t wait for that. Now I’m on Medicare and I’m still waiting.

Remember the Segway? They teased this revolutionary product for months before it was unveiled. It would, in the words of investment banker John Doerr, be more important than the internet. Everyone would have one, you wouldn’t be able to live without it. It was introduced in 2001 on national television. The public yawned and walked away, not on a personal transport device but on their own two feet.*

But for all the pie in the sky numericals being tossed around by Musk and Wall Street, here’s the one that stood out to me: Fidelity Investments and others lowered their IPO early-investmentment minimums from $500,000 to $2,000, in order, ostensibly, to give the common man access to this fabulous, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Huh?

Let me get this straight. America’s high flying financial world, which routinely collects millions of dollars of fees by selling good companies to asset-strippers; which chews up and spits out loyal employees like gristle on a chicken wing; which brought on the Great Recession by selling mansions to paupers and faking the quality of the loans — THAT financial world is suddenly concerned that the little guy may miss out on the deal of the century?

I smell a rat the size of Ursa Major. If, 13 years from now as Morgan Stanley projects, SpaceX is generating $3.4 trillion in sales, what do they need our grubby $2,000 for?

This tells me that Elon Musk is coming after the chumps. This is your boyfriend running through the door and telling you that his greasy friend in a sleeveless Marshall Tucker Band t-shirt back at the pool hall has found a sure-fire investment deal, “and guess what, sugar, he’s going to let both of us in.”

I look at SpaceX, and for all its admitted potential, all I can see is the Trump Phone. It’ll be released any day now. Meanwhile, we’ll just hang on to your deposit because the fine print said no refunds.**

Because here’s how it works in 2026 America: If this were such a sure-fire money maker, no way in hell would they be allowing the average person on the street to take part. We’d be shut out faster than 2 Broke Girls at a Royal Wedding.

But the fact is, they need dumb money to make this rocket fly. Which it will for a while, until all the insiders take their profits and leave the stock to slump along with minimal returns because Radisson-Mars is no closer to reality than it was in the Neosulturian Period.

The fact of the matter is that SpaceX as currently comprised has one money-maker: Starlink. Satellite internet is 70% of SpaceX revenue, meaning Musk is using it to disguise drek like Grok the way a master chef tries to make a locust palatable by wrapping it in bacon.

An investment in SpaceX is a pure play on the believability of Elon Musk.

“People are going to be buying this stock because of Elon Musk,” said Angelo Bochanis, an analyst at Renaissance Capital. “They believe in the man. They believe in the mission. And they don’t really care about what multiple they’re buying it at, right?”

Right. They believe that maybe one day there will be a need for companies with names like Hyperloop and Neuralink. That maybe one day The Boring Company will actually drill a tunnel. That maybe Tesla’s handful of semi-self driving taxis will catch up to Google’s well-established Waymo.

But the professionals know better, despite what they say publicly. They remember how they lent Musk $13 billion to buy Twitter then got left holding the steaming hot mess of a bag when he ran it aground.

Or maybe not. Maybe finance, like everything else today, is virtual, and things like profits and debt no longer matter so long as everybody keeps believing, the way Peter walked on the water. Temporarily.

To me, SpaceX looks for all the world like a meme stock that happens to make rockets. It ought to be called FaithX. Believe at your own risk.

* A fascinating trivia question is this: What do Usain Bolt, George W. Bush and Ellen DeGeneres have in common? They all crashed on a Segway. The company was sold to a British investor who was killed when he ran his Segway off a cliff, true story. It went out of business after selling only 140,000 units, mostly to governments that weren’t spending their own money. For the record, the internet is still around.

** Actually it didn’t, at least not at first; this language was added only after 60,000 Trump-loving dupes had laid out their cash.

So for Graham Platner there is hope.

Democrats today are suffering through a painful case of Platner Fasciitis following a drumbeat of unsavory revelations about his not-so-distant past.

His supporters more or less argue that Platner is more qualified to serve in the Senate because he has had the experiences of a bruised and conflicted life that tracks more with the average American than it does with the privileged, gilded butterflies currently serving in Washington.

I guess. But aren’t there hardbitten people out there who have somehow managed to maintain their moral scruples after losing a job, serving overseas or even self medicating internal pain?

A fair number of guys, I have to believe, don’t feel the need to drop their pants every time they bounce a check.

Platner’s other defenses of his indiscretions — ranging from an ignorance of Nazi symbolism to PTSD to alcoholic stupors — are … are what? Plausible? Contrived? Or weirdly congruous and incongruous at the same time, like Sen. John Fetterer blaming his craziness on mental illness.

But I wonder what Gary Hart, Chuck Robb, Al Franken and Larry “Wide Stance” Craig are thinking about all this. They had the misfortune of coming along in the American political era of Peak Prude, when the old excuse of boys-will-be-boys (see Mills, Wilbur) was no longer acceptable, but the new excuse of universal depravity (i.e., nothing is so vile as to be grounds for disqualification) had yet to take hold.*

Bob Packwood, who died over the weekend, would have been an interesting case had his career coincided with today’s political environment. His middle-of-the pack lechery parallels the career of, say, MLB outfielder Nick Markakis, who put up solid numbers, but fell well short of the Hall of Fame.**

In a pre-cell phone world, when a sexual predator had to eat a good breakfast and burn some serious shoe leather to get the job done, Packwood was unavailed of these helpful technologies that late at night, after a couple of beers, allow you to ask yourself, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to snap a photo of the ole John Thomas and sent it to my deputy chief caseworker for veterans affairs?”

Liberal think tanks, moralists and those who tenaciously believe in the possibility of a perfect politician the way Linus believed in the Great Pumpkin would hang Platner from a cross, even if it would cost them the Senate and lead directly to the destruction of all the policies they hold dear. At least they’re sincere. Less so are the perpetually fretting Democratic party operatives who are shrieking that Platner is too damaged to win — nevermind that just three months ago they were shrieking that his primary opponent Janet Mills was too old.

Of them I would ask: Have you ever been to Maine?

If you have, you will notice that Graham Platner looks exactly like everyone living northwest of Kennebunkport. Minus the walrus moustache, he’s the mirror image of a Calais bartender 30 years ago who, when asked by a woman I was seeing at the time for a white zinfandel, stared at her silent and expressionless for a full 10 seconds before finally turning around and pouring her a plastic cup of Chardonnay. He would not have been one to let a few smutty phone calls influence his vote one way or another.

Today’s Republicans — who would elect a woodpile if they thought there was a snake in it — have simply walked around Democratic high ground which insists that no human shortcoming is so trivial that it should not be purged with auto-da-fé-like intensity.

But in Maine, voters seem to be hungry for a junkyard dog who can give Susan Collins something to really be concerned about, by grabbing her hair and slamming her worried little face nose-down into her milk toast.

The depressing way to look at it is this: We are living in a post-moral world where Trumpian politics have destroyed all sense of political dignity, where decency and fair play is for chumps and our political order has entered a black hole of meanness, depravity and corruption from which there is no escape..

The optimistic way to look at it is this: We have come to understand that human nature is complex, and great leaders, like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, can sprout from common clay.

The practical way to look at it is this: Politics, like war, causes harm to some people, no matter how just the cause. And we as a voting public must be sophisticated enough to decide whether the fears and offenses stirred by dirty texts and racist rhetoric are better/worse than apparently understanding that your vote could cost millions of people food and health care — and doing it anyway.

* Bridging this gap was Wayne Hays, who divorced his wife and hired a mistress, Elizabeth Ray, to be his taxpayer funded secretary. She later admitted “I can’t type. I can’t file. I can’t even answer the phone.” Hays then married his Ohio secretary, and Ray sold him out, not because he didn’t marry her instead, but because “he didn’t even invite me to the wedding.”

** The 1980s were the salad years of congressional depravity, bringing us legends such as Gary Hart, Dan Crane, Bob Bauman, Buz Lukens, Gary Studds and Barney Frank. It was also a decade in flux, as offenses could be addressed with everything from a finger wagging to reprimand to resignation to defeat at the polls. Ernie Konnyu of California was primaried after asking an aide to move her nametag so as not to draw attention to her breasts — he later denied there was reason to do such a thing, saying, “She’s not exactly heavily stacked, OK?” Dan Quayle was effectively cleared of naughty behavior (while on a golf trip that included nude model and lobbyist Paula Parkinson) by his wife Marilyn, who said her husband “would rather play golf than have sex any day.” Rep. John Hinson resigned office for a scandal involving a male Library of Congress employee, although in court he was able to have accusations of sodomy effectively pleaded down to a charge of “following too close.”

Photo by the Associated Press

Billionaires don’t see it that way, of course. Each one seems to see his own personal existence as essential to perpetuating some vague notion of global progress, that without their existence will be lost.

They are, in effect, saying:

“We are so exceedingly and exponentially smart (rocketship blows up on launchpad) and are so much better able to watch out for your interests than you people are yourselves (lays off 15,000 employees) that it is essential that our decision-making acumen (government services crippled by massive cuts) be extended well beyond today’s average lifespan, so that our unquestioned genius (AI instructs people to put glue on pizza) will not be lost on future generations (loses $2b in crypto) and this cocoon we call earth can realize its potential (destroys the Washington Post) and burst forth in a butterfly of enlightenment, competence and rational decision making (spends $6.2 million to buy banana duct-taped to wall).

Yes, by all means, we need another 75 years of Peter Theil to finish the job. So these billionaires want to grant themselves eternal life, like Apollo, Chiron the centaur or Jan from the Toyota ads.

The stampede to immortality seems to be led by a cat named Bryan Johnson, who has founded Project Blueprint, an initiative through which he is attempting to reduce the biological age of his organs to that of an 18-year-old and “make death an option.” In this pursuit he’s spending $2 million a year and has taken as many as 111 daily supplements. Even Lyle Alzado thinks that’s crazy.

And get this: Johnson is willing to let you in! For $333 a month you too can have the liver of a college freshman — wait, bad example — let’s just say you can unquestionably be on your way to choosing your own death date the way you would pick, say, a June wedding.

And lest you think he’s not serious, his investors include known scientist Kim Kardashian, and he has written such analytical passages as “I post nudes on social media. I track my nighttime erections. My team openly discusses my semen health.”

Nothing to see here. Comforting to know he’ll be around giving inspirational speeches at crypto conferences well into his 150s.

He’s not alone. Thiel ($7 million donor to the Methuselah Foundation), Jeff Bezos ($3 billion backer of Altos Labs, focused on cell rejuvenation), Sam Altman ($180 million investor in Retro Biosciences, which “treats the human body like a system with bugs that can be patched”) and Christian Angermayer (don’t ask) are all in on the hunt as well.*

“These are the longevity billionaires, a new class of ultra-wealthy individuals who have decided that dying is a problem money can solve. And they are not wrong about the money part,” writes Social Life Magazine,** which says longevity is a $27 trillion industry, more than the GDP of all nations save the U.S. and China.

The scientific consensus is that some of this, like cellular reprogramming, is semi-legitimate and may lead to benefits in time; others, like extermination of nonproductive “zombie cells” was theoretically valid, but failed in clinical tests; and most of the rest is highly priced snake oil, something like a merger of GNC with Neiman Marcus.

A second-tier tranche of live-forever fanboys include politicians and oligarchs, who are paying close attention to the field and appear ready to buy in. World-leading eminences Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, for example, were famously caught on a hot mike waxing optimistic about their chances of living into the next century.

Figures. The one thread we’ve all held onto while living under three of the most incompetent leaders in world history is that they’re all going to die — and now they want to take even that away from us.

Needless to say, these exotic treatments, if they work at all, will be the exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy. No reason we need a bunch of 170-year-old highway flagmen hanging around.

And maybe that should come as a relief. Those mythological unfortunates doomed to everlasting life — the Wandering Jew, Prometheus, the Flying Dutchman — have bitterly regretted it. Besides, constant worrying about how long you have to live probably subtracts more years from your life than longevity treatments add to it.

* An inescapable conclusion is that these oligarchs care little about the human race, but are in a competition to outlive each other. It must gall 81-year-old Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and owner of an entire Hawaiian island, that he’s only the sixth wealthiest man in the world. Outliving the whippersnappers would settle the score.

**The article, written by Cass Almendral, is worth the read. It documents how botox and yoga are now transitioning to peptide facials and red light therapy, at far greater expense. Hinted at is that this is, at root, more about status than health, and is grist for rarified discussions at Topping Rose about what you learned that morning in epigenetic counseling. Whatever that is.

Less hinted at is that, for all your rarified longevity treatments, one set of substandard, Sears & Roebuck-grade genes can face-plant you on the sidewalk simply by shoveling snow. Assuming these people know which end of a snow shovel to use which, no offense, they probably don’t.

If he had, the Oklahoma City bomber’s payback for killing 167 men, women and children in 1995 wouldn’t have been a rude poke from the night-night needle, it would have been the possibility of winning valuable cash and prizes in the new American game show, “Who Wants To Be A Felonious Millionaire?”

There couldn’t be a more clear-cut example of the sort of “man” Donald Trump wants to shower with cash. It was, after all, the evil Democratic President Bill Clinton, known husband of Crooked Hillary, who weaponized the FBI to unfairly persecute McVeigh simply for exercising his right to anti-government free speech.

McVeigh is Trump’s kind of guy, through and through. If you can’t get what you want through legal channels, you either barge through all conventions of a civilized society to get it, and if that still doesn’t work then you make somebody pay. And if those somebodies just happen to be occupants of a pre-school daycare center, that’s just the fault of some woke Democrat for entrusting children to government care.

Trump’s $1.776 billion criminal slush fund is, of course, symbolic of the founding of the nation, just as McVeigh’s chosen date of April 19, 1995, was symbolic of the 220th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, in which brave, colonial militiamen fired the first shot in the name of freedom by bombing a British office building.

Having committed the crime of insurrection on January 6, rioter Richard Barnett famously and stupidly had himself photographed with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, which was basically all the evidence prosecutors needed. Similarly, McVeigh was stopped mid-getaway for failure to have a front license plate. Bone-headedness seems to be endemic to the breed.

One advancement modern-day thugs have added to their skill set over the past 30 years is greed. Even before The Donald’s official announcement of tax dollars for cop beaters, these patriots were abuzz that a windfall was headed their way.

Because money is the reason true patriots are in the game, right? Weren’t those the last words of Nathan Hale? “I regret that I have but one bank account for my country to fill with cash.”

In perhaps the most mind-bending instance, Florida man Andy Johnson, after being pardoned by Trump, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for sexually abusing two children.

But wait, it gets better. Alerted that a fortune of Trump Bucks might be headed his way, he approached one of the victims with an offered I.O.U. in exchange for recanting their testimony.

How does that conversation even go?

“Hey pun’kin, sorry about the diddling and all. Sometimes when I’ve had a couple of beers or 30 I forget myself. But listen to this, remember when your Uncle Andy got into a little bit of a stink pot in the Capitol building for slamming that police officer’s head up against the portrait of John Adams? We, it turns out I was victimized, do you know what victimized means? Naw, I ain’t sure either, but get this, due to my victimized status, the greatest president in our history is going to be sending me a shitload of cash. And puddin’, Uncle Andy is a’willin’ to let you in on it. All you have to do is go to the nice prosecutor lady and tell her exactly what I just … no wait, don’t tell her that. Tell her … I’ll get back to you.”

No wonder the American flag shudders convulsively every time one of these true patriots drapes it over his shoulders.

Violence just follows Trump (at least one thing DJT has in common with the most recent shooter is that both the guy inside and outside the White House think they’re Jesus) so It’s hard not to conclude that Trump and rioters deserve each other. And paint me unimpressed by the conventional wisdom that The Donald is essentially using tax dollars to hire a roving band of goons to terrorize innocent Americans at ballot boxes or protests or any place hired goons might come in handy.

So he’s supposed to be like Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles advertising for banditos to terrorize the town of Rock Ridge: “I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers … and Methodists”

OK, but — the way it’s going, by 2028 there won’t be very many of the Capitol Hill Gang left who haven’t wound up back in prison or gone full Darwin Awards following their communal pardon and release.

Ryan Nichols was re-arrested after reaching for a handgun during an argument in a church parking lot. Days after his release from prison, Matthew Huttle was shot and killed while resisting arrest during a traffic stop. Christopher Moynihan was charged with threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries. David Daniel plea bargained to charges he “enticed a child under the age of 12 into sexually explicit conduct for purposes of making a video, and Daniel Tocci was sentenced after investigators found “more than 100,000 child sexual abuse images and videos, along with that of a female being shot in the head, a cat in a blender and a dog being beaten to death.”

What, you thought people who were capable of defecating in the Capitol were going to calm down and start volunteering for the United Way? Also interesting that apparently a strong contingent of the people who accuse Democrats of sexually exploiting children are in fact doing the same thing themselves.

Will they ever get one dime? I seriously doubt it. Remember, this is Trump who’s making the offer. He doesn’t even pay people when he’s under court order, what chance do these lowlifes have? Oh, he may pay them in worthless Trump memecoins that he has sold to the Department of Justice, pocketing the $1.776 billion for himself.

So we the taxpayers will still lose, but at least the thuggish morons won’t win. The way things are going today, I guess you take that as a win.

The convicted biotech huckster is rotting in a Texas prison, while her fellow male grifters were sashaying around in China, eating beef ribs and lobster balls and grubbing for some other financial scam that will put even more money in their well-lined pockets.

She’s in jail for overhyping a technology that wasn’t quite there yet. It was sort of like, oh I don’t know, if you had told people you had this great new made-in-America mobile phone with the best coverage ever, and then failed to deliver on that promise.

Or maybe even sold people a bunch of memecoins that are now worth squadoosh, wouldn’t that be bad? Or bought profitable companies, stripped them of their assets and sold the brand name to a foreign sweat shop that makes tactical sunglasses. Or ruined a social media company with Nazi-themed hate speech or made employees urinate in plastic bottles, or donated millions of dollars to politicians in a thinly veiled effort to win government contracts.

Fortunately none of that kind of stuff ever happens, certainly not among the corporate slummers on a fast plane to China. So instead, we level our bazookas of justice at the little lady who just wanted to be one of the (very rich) boys. Sorry, dah-ling, our club’s bylaws are very explicit: No girls!

Holmes herself understood this, habitually dressing in the all-black ensemble that has become uniform of female venture-capitalist ascension, most recently worn by Musk acolyte Shivon Zillis, whose black slacks, mock turtle and windbreaker combined with dark glasses make her look like Yoko Ono mixing frozen daiquiris at a Vegas piano bar. Zillis knows the only way to stay current with the world’s richest man is to dress like a boy and have about 40 of his children.

Holmes today is gleefully villainized online with words like words like “fraudster,” “disgraced” and “hustler.” Boy, don’t you just love it? She got what was coming to her, that greedy, lying, gold-digging huzzie. Had she been male, I feel sure that the chatter would have been more along the lines that his only sin was that he “got caught” because “everybody does it” and why make an example out of someone who’s only trying to achieve the American dream?

Except this hypothetical is no good, because had she been male she never would have been prosecuted in the first place, not in today’s world. And she should have known. She should have had a nice long chat with Martha Stewart.

A woman dares engage in insider trading, she goes to prison. In West Virginia. Meanwhile, evidence is pretty clear that a full third of Congress is doing exactly the same thing pretty much every day of the week. Not to mention that Pete Hegseth, er, some mysterious, unidentified party is making hundreds of thousands of dollars trafficking insider military secrets on Polymarket.

Yet give the Epstein Class credit, it always keeps plenty of women around. Because you never know when you’ll need someone to blame. It’s no accident that the scapegoats in the train wreck of Trump’s second term have had names like Pam, Kristi and Lori.

They were the oily rags that the mechanic tosses in the dumpster marked “Biohazard.”.

Price of gas $4.79? Blame a woman. Americans murdered in the streets? Blame a woman. Turkey too dry? Well, obviously.

For Holmes, her error wasn’t in getting rich, it was in not getting rich enough.

Air Force One never would have swooped down out of the skies and whisked her off to the Forbidden City, because while she had money, she didn’t have that kind of money. Money is the only yardstick The Donald knows, so when he’s feeling insecure he surrounds himself with the people who have the most cash, the way most normal people would surround themselves with loved ones in times of stress.

Money is Trump’s only value. You no-doubt noticed that his (female) “spiritual advisor” didn’t make the trip. And man, could he have used some prayer. Bounding around and panting like a puppy while Xi had a leash in one hand and a rolled up newspaper in the other, giving Trump a little swat whenever the American president got a little out of line.

Even school girls who have just met Mason Thames think that Trump lost his dignity, pleading with the Chinese to get him out of the messes he’s created and heaping mountains of praise on the leader that just 18 months ago Trump-the-candidate had portrayed as the incarnation of all that was evil. Along with Joe Biden.

In the midst of this performance, I couldn’t help thinking, where’s Hillary Clinton when you need her? Can you imagine if Xi had prattled on to her about a Thucydides Trap in front of her? She would have said, “Oh, blow it out your ass, Conficious.”

Trump, in a wash of deference and cluelessness, just stood there and took it. He probably thinks he had Thucydides once, but was able to knock it out with a couple rounds of penicillin.

The question is whether women will ever achieve the level, not just of money but of depravity it takes to become a member of the club. When women get richer they tend to get more generous. Not always, you get the occasional Leona Helmsley, but often. They start giving money away without expecting any political favors in return. They seek out cures for social ills and diseases; unlike uber-wealthy males, they seem to recall that people of all classes deserve life’s little pleasures, like food.

They measure the worth of their lives by many things, not just by whether their bank accounts are bigger than the person seated next to them at Mar-a-Lago. In short, they think of people other than themselves.

Oh, forget it, they’ll never fit in.

Pity the mainstream media, whose job it is to get the viewing public excited about these two chuckleheads. It’s like the WBC and the WBA trying to get us jacked for a world boxing title unification fight between Buster Douglas and Riddick Bowe. It’s taking your kid to the grocery and giving him a choice between pinto beans and lentils. In Trumpian verbiage, it will be the Epic Snore.

Call me Nostradamus if you must, but here’s an advance recap of the talks: Trump will give away the store, then crow about a great win because the Chinese have promised to buy more soybeans, which in fact they will never do.*

As for Xi, if history is a guide, he’ll come out with one of those classic Chinese statements like “A blind monkey drinks no milk from a painted dish” and we’ll all assign great wisdom and insight to it, even though it only masks the truth that he has no clue what to do either.

On its website, the Council of Foreign Relations puts it this way: “Now, Trump will meet the Chinese leader convinced he is winning.” That misplaced modifier sounds about right — who’s winning? Who knows? Who cares?

Trump is such a moron that he shot off all our best weapons in a war that has left us worse off than when we started it. Xi is such a paranoid psychopath that he fired all his best generals for perceived disloyalty. It’s like a contest to see which superpower is most efficient at committing suicide.

Except that honor appears to be reserved for Russia, which will soon become the first nation to bomb itself back to the stone ages. Like Trump, Putin can never admit that his military flex was, like, a bad idea, and so his deadly folly will drag on and on as every technological and cultural advancement it ever had is lost.

Putin has no TACO tendencies, and although it seems weird to think of chickening out as a positive human attribute, it is probably Trump’s best characteristic — at least in the sense that it serves to pull the plug on his most bone-headed of dalliances before they totally implode.

Nor does Xi ever back down, making Trump the weakling of the three, but not necessarily in an entirely bad way. The difference is that Putin and Xi seem to have things they resolutely believe in, whereas Trump’s superpower, if you want to call it that, is his ability to change his beliefs three or four times in the same sentence.** You know he’s never really going to turn the car around right this minute and drive back home, and the people and nations that have figured that out are best at dealing with the U.S. at this particular moment in time.

But here’s the thing about all three: Considerring Trump’s wars and tariffs, Xi’s imperialism and human rights abuses, Putin’s special military operation and rape of his own people — have the world’s three top leaders at any time in history caused more abject human misery around the planet than X-P-T?

From Cuba to Russia to Southeast Asia to Tibet to Africa to Gaza to the Middle East to the American heartland, to Ukraine, people are suffering for no good reason at all, other than that these three dipshits*** care about no one’s health and welfare but their own.

I hear people saying, ‘they can’t be total idiots or they wouldn’t have achieved power.’ Wrong. Don’t confuse perseverance and lawlessness with intelligence. Dumb people achieve power all the time. Look at Enron, whose leaders rose through the ranks presumably because they could do a little math. Then it turned out they weren’t even any good at that.

So as Little Marco put it, we have to dispel with the fiction that Trump is a cunning dealmaker, Xi a stoic visionary or Putin some kind of grand chessmaster. All three are not just stupid, but aggressively stupid. If you are reading this essay without moving your lips, you are more qualified to be a world leader.

These are not complex men. You can find a half-dozen like them at the local pool hall. I can save future biographers endless quantities of time and ink — there is no need to waste time searching their souls for inner conflict, enlightenment or some textured umbilical cord to their quidity. Because they ain’t there. Putin, Xi and Trump only care about power, and will ruin anyone and anything to get it. There’s your biography. Anything else is just details.

Thankfully, if you’re an American, this is a good time to have bad leadership, because everyone else has leaders that are only slightly better or maybe even worse. Putin’s Russia is actually falling further behind Trump’s America, and while Xi’s China might be pulling ahead, don’t worry; he’ll blow it. In NFL parlance, world history at this particular point in time is like the NFC South. Somebody has to win it, but whoever it is won’t go far in the playoffs.

In fact, for an apt comparison, you have to go back to the Third Century when Rome, the Han Dynasty and the Kushan Empire were all crashing and burning at about the same time.

And we know what happened after that. Dark Ages, anyone?

* Only because it’s my home state, I vividly remember China’s $83.7 billion “memorandum of understanding” for West Virginia that was an outcome of Trump’s 2017 visit, which would have exceeded the state’s entire GDP, but of course never materialized. Shocking, I know.

** A month ago Iran’s new leaders were “much more reasonable” than the old guard. This week they are “lunatics.”

*** I don’t throw sophisticated terms like ‘dipshits’ around lightly. Nor is it lost on me that ‘dipshit’ connotes an goofy haplessness that may not entirely fit. But the stores of appropriate synonyms for these pig-headed loons can be depleted faster than you would think.

In the book (it’s considered to be racist today, but then, what isn’t?) Sambo is given a colorful ensemble of clothing, which he proudly wears until confronted by four tigers who threaten to eat him unless he gives them his outfit. All goes well for about two seconds until the tigers start arguing over who looks better wearing these purloined articles of clothing, at which point they start chasing each other around a tree in anger at such warp speed that they turn to butter, which Sambo eats on his pancakes.

The primary lesson of this little work is that the author was clearly under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms. But other themes of vanity, greed, status, jealousy and wealth got me thinking about last night’s Met Gala.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual fundraiser has always been an exclusive, pretentious-to-the-point-of-comical affair specifically designed to make the rest of America secretly relieved that we are not rich enough to attend. And that’s perfectly fine. We don’t want to go to their party any more than they would want to stand around a keg seeing who can belch the loudest.

The Met’s outrageous costumes (even the standard bearer of good taste, publisher Anna Wintour, was wearing something that looked like a Polish Tophat chicken in need of a good molt) are apparently chosen on the basis of what is most likely to land them on the front page of the Times. To the rest of us, it’s like the episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy bets Ricky, Fred and Ethel she can go 24 hours without lying: “If that’s the dress you like, you sure got a good one.”

But there’s trouble brewing in Metworld.

These sparkly billionaires — whose flashy clothes have been won by robbing us Sambos of jobs, money, reasonable social policies and software that actually works — are starting to chase each other around a tree.

Of top concern among Met attendees was that their party had been crashed by the soulless Jeff Bezos and his vacuous but richly upholstered wife Lauren, who festoons herself with the most expensive of everything, like a child decorating a Christmas tree who doesn’t know when to quit.

The Met’s Old Guard nominally protested Bezos’ alleged sweatshop-like conditions at Amazon, his ruining of The Washington Post, his cozying up to DJT and his in-your-face extravagance with weddings at Versailles and $50 million yachts, even as many normal Americans are struggling to get by.

But make no mistake, this isn’t about social justice, this is about style. Which tiger wears it best?

These prior Gatekeepers of Fashion have been rocked by the crypto-flashing Epstein Class that judges the merits of, say, a handbag, on how much it costs, not by its intrinsic quality. So designers are simply shrugging and replacing $500 price tags with $11,000 price tags, which makes them more appealing, it seems.

Nevermind that Old Money’s investment banks and private equity parasites started the job that New Money’s sports gambling and data centers are finishing. Whether the gains were ill-gotten or not, it’s OK to be rich so long as you show some class.

I daresay that grass-roots MAGA, with its Spandex and Let’s Go Brandon t-shirts is, less threatening to the establishment than those who build grandiose ballrooms and arches, decorate the Oval Office as if it were a Virginia City cathouse, and appreciate nothing in nature beyond golf courses or a fountains surrounded by three acres of pavers from Home Depot.

Maybe most symbolic of the new garishness is what has become known as Mar-a-Lago Face, an almost indescribably clownish look that includes skin stretched like a balloon, enough eye black to make an NFL tight end blush, and a grotesque, fleshy lip procedure whereby every time she shows her teeth, it looks like an iguana passing an egg.*

The male of this species use their resources in the way that males with too much money and too little taste have always used it — they fight, either in court or by paying for mixed-martial arts lessons and threatening to whip each other in the ring. They invest in bananas taped to walls, memecoins and Non-Fungible Tokens** that no normal person would care to own or even be able to describe.

Maybe these newly minted billionaires will figure it out, that beauty matters, that there’s a whole natural world to explore and that the $11,000 spent on handbag that is used once and then relegated to the closet to make way for a $15,000 handbag, could make a real difference to a struggling nonprofit. Maybe all these faces will in time deflate back to a normal look.

Or maybe they will keep chasing and chasing, tormented by their own riches and convinced that the only answer to having too much money is by obtaining even more money.

I’m fine with it either way — if they figure it out, all the wealth that’s congealed at the top could turn this country around. And if they don’t figure it out, those pancakes will taste awfully good.

* This look is not entirely new, and you may recognize it if you watched c. 1970 beauty pageants, which we always did for some reason. The winners were always from Texas, Florida and, occasionally, North Carolina, and while their beauty was subjective, they all had The Look: puffed hair, heavy eye shadow and that sweet-and-sour expression with the raised upper lip of an aggrieved canine. Somewhere, Anita Bryant is shouting her approval.

** No clue as to whether this is still a thing.

Disaffected gunman tries to assassinate President Trump. How dull is that? At this point, who hasn’t tried to assassinate President Trump? It’s almost like the President of the United States is sitting in a dunking booth at the county fair. Step right up, three shots for a dollar.

The only reason this isn’t Page 3 news is that the latest story of gun violence happened in a room with hundreds of reporters— even our increasingly impotent and compromised media industrial complex couldn’t miss this story.

When word leaked out that there’d been a shooting at the annual Correspondent’s Dinner, America sat on the edge of their seats as reporters, with lightning skill and speed, sought the answer that everyone always desperately wants to know after there’s been a shooting: Was the gunman a Democrat or a Republican?

Or if there is a god, maybe he’ll turn out to be a Mexican who can be pointed to in the next State of the Union address as a reason to fully fund ICE. Or maybe an off-the-charts psychotic, who can be used to highlight red-state mania to pass inalienable rights to carry guns even into churches and bars, where high quantities of alcohol are served. (In the bars, not the churches. Presumably.)

But if you have a finely tuned media ear, what was really weird was a subtle undercurrent suggesting that not even the press quite believed that what had just happened had really happened. They heard some bangs, yes. But it could have been a car backfiring. It could have been a baggage cart knocked over by a clumsy bellhop. It could have been the Houston Astros stealing signs from the dugout.

Here’s what Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, thinks: “Has there ever been a president have this many close ‘attempts’ on their life? Maybe it’s lax gun laws, maybe it’s lack of mental health funding, or maybe it’s fake … who knows …”

Crockett is deftly shifting what should be a sympathetic moment for the president into a chance to be critical of him. Like most politicians today, it is unclear whether she believes what she believes. By putting “attempts” in quotes and casually throwing in the word “fake,” she’s signalling disbelief, but doing so in a tone* that stops short of full-blown government space-alien-coverup territory.

But she’s right about this: attacks, plural.

Usually an assassination attempt becomes a defining moment of a presidency (see Reagan, Ronald W.) and the perp (John Hinckley) becomes a household name. But I defy you to name all three (or is it four) would-be Trump assassins. Multiple attempts, plural, stray into the world of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

According to The Washington Post, “the conspiracy theory is spreading fast online, building into a widespread narrative that President Donald Trump and his associates planned the event to drum up support for the president, his party — and the planned White House ballroom, an event space he has argued could prevent future attacks.”

I admit, Trump came up with this ballrooms-prevent-assassinations line a little too fast, like he’d already scribbled it out on the cocktail napkin before the shooting started.

I also admit he didn’t seemed overly nonplussed with this event, unlike the heart-racing panic he demonstrated following Assassination Attempt #1 (or was it #2 — the ear one, whichever that was).

I also, also admit there is a troubling cone of silence around some of the most pertinent details, to wit, who did all the shooting, the suspect or the security, and if it was the security, does that mean they shot their own guy? This administration is better understood by listening to what it doesn’t say than to the perpetual disinformation it spouts out loud.

Yet why is it hard for the American public on both sides of the aisle to accept that the simplest answer is the likeliest: A disaffected American got his hands on a gun and bullrushed an event he knew the president to be attending. What is even remotely suspicious about that?

More people despise Trump than adore him, by 2-1 if the polls are to be believed. So this crime is straight from the classic Charlie Chan whodunnit, where the murderer is hard to identify because everyone loathed the victim.**

The problem is that the truth is in no one’s best interests, not even the purported target, so veracity is wadded up and cast aside like so much Lady Bird Johnson-era roadside litter, leaving everyone free to construct their own version of reality without fear of being called on it.

Virtual truth is now, in terms of importance, outpacing actual truth. Maybe no one deep in their soul really thinks the assassination attempt was faked, but that doesn’t matter anymore because the collective narrative is that Trump would do anything to get his ballroom built, including a staged an attempt on his life. So that storyline becomes the accepted truth.

Trump has, in particular, made this bed, which is why no one seems to be sympathetic to him now. We saw the first seeds in the blatantly false GOP campaign ads in which the defense was, “Well, it may not be true, but it could be true, that’s the point.”

Now, everything could be true, and what began on the right is infecting the left — which, as in the redistricting fight, increasingly believes it has to create its own fake counter-narrative to battle the right’s fakery.

Staging a gunfight to get his ballroom built and deflect from his disastrous record in office “sounds like something Trump would do.” So that makes it true, regardless. The moral of the story has made the facts of the story irrelevant.

In a world where you have to disenfranchise vast swaths of voters and ignore the facts on the ground just to stay competitive, anything goes. Of course in the world we have now, the optimistic view is that anything’s better than the truth.

* See the trap she sets for Republican orthodoxy, which dismisses gun control and mental health funding — so “fake” is the only option left. If only politicians could put this kind of cleverness into legislation.

** The cliche scene is where the suspect, under intense interrogation, says, “Yes I hated him, but I didn’t want to see him dead.”

The Donald explained that “We’re taking this decision, this decisive step, to confront one of the most urgent public health challenges facing our nation, the mental health crisis.”

Says the man who thinks he’s crushing it in Iran, that inflation is at its lowest point ever and that windmills cause brain cancer.

Well, it would sure explain a lot, wouldn’t it? How many times in college did you drop a couple tabs and start believing you could build a giant arch?

We’ve seen footage of the cabinet meetings, but we don’t see what they’re taking beforehand. So maybe it’s not pandering, maybe they really do see Charlemagne when they look at Trump, as the sconces behind him drip off the wall.

This could explain why Trump’s inner circle plays pranks with dead bear cubs, teleports themselves to Waffle House, confuses gobbledygook with Bible verse, chugs beer in hockey dressing rooms, presumes to school the Pope on Catholicism, sleeps with the help and then fires them when they don’t bring her enough wine, brags about shooting the family dog, (takes a deep breath) fires entire departments and dances on stage with a chainsaw then hires them all back after learning they did actual work, proposes “cure beds” that erase sickness just by lying down, plans to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with a UCF fight on the White House lawn, and, well, you get the photo.

Even ChatGPT thinks these hallucinations are over the top.

“... and all of a sudden I was on this street, and it was like in this small town, and I think it was Ohio — yeah, I know, Ohio, right? — and all of a sudden it blew my mind, I was surrounded by these, these like Haitians, and they were all 20 feet tall with great big teeth and they could fly, and it was so wild, they were eating the dogs, they were eating the cats …”

Mental health? Yes, this administration should try some.

If you know anything at all about LSD — which I do only because I’ve read a lot of books — a typical Trump speech is not that far removed from what you would expect of someone who’s tripping up on stage in front of thousands of people. Untethered from reality, changing the subject, going off on flights of fancy.

There’s this debate as to whether The Donald is genuinely ill or whether it’s all an act to keep his opponents off balance. His speeches are intentionally nonsensical, something he calls “the weave,” and his contradictions (most recently failing to remember who he’d sent to Pakistan to negotiate peace) just part of a cunning stratagem to disguise his true intentions.

I have a couple former colleagues in Washington who have somehow survived a chronic bout of journalism, and here’s what they would tell you: You don’t get to see the whole speech.

Mainstream media still has these reflexive institutional vestiges of decency and fair play, dating to the time when they were loath to photograph a heavily leg-braced FDR below the waist.

So they scour a two hour speech for 15 seconds of tape that will sound mildly coherent to the husband and wife cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, and that’s what you get to see.

Even the unflattering ~10 minute clips that, say, MS NOW airs to make Trump look crazy don’t really tell the story, in the way that it would be impossible to get a true sense of The Flying Dutchman just by listening to the Spinning Song.

The administration’s press-office cover story — that of course he looks crazy to you, because he is such an other-worldly genius that your feeble brain could possibly make sense of it, any more than it could comprehend thermodynamics — is a nice try, but is belied by the general panic and damage control among administration staffers every time The Donald takes a Casey-Jones like deviation from the rails.

So how worried about all this should we all be? I’m going to take a real flyer here and suggest that the Trumpian brain cells that are currently scattering like quail at a Dick Cheny hunting party still have one major totally psychotic and unexpected rally left in them — and that’s going to be a severe lurch to the left.

Especially if the GOP gets hosed in the midterms, DJT, you can bet: 1. Won’t to be seen as a loser; 2. Needs a way to blunt congressional investigations coming from the left; 3. Will crave some sort of branded policy legacy (like Obamacare) that transcends arches and ballrooms; 4. Despite all the bluster and bravado, will not want to go down in history as the most despised American ever. 5. Will be secretly seething at all the far-right piranha scheming to take his place.

That’s what I think. And yes, I’ll have another couple of mushrooms, thank you.