Dispatches from a Collapsing State: The Boondoggle and the Betrayal
As you know, dear reader, my lens doesn’t just observe; it reacts to the heat of the fire.  And right now, California isn’t just burning – it’s being incinerated by the very man holding the matches.
Gavin Newsom’s recent performance on Bill Maher’s stage was a masterclass in the kind of polished delusion that only a man insulated by a security detail and a $200-billion-plus budget can muster.  To hear him tell it, the Golden State is a shining beacon of progress.  But for those of us living in the trenches of Fecal Creek – watching the local infrastructure decay while the bills skyrocket – the reality is a jagged, mechanical nightmare of mismanagement.

The $231 Billion Ghost Train
The centerpiece of Newsom’s Maher defense was the High Speed Rail.  He called it “essential infrastructure.”  The rest of us called it a multi-hundred-billion-dollar boondoggle.  What started as a $33 billion promise to voters back in 2008 has metastasized into a $231 billion fiscal black hole.
This isn’t “transportation”; it’s a monument to the sunk-cost fallacy.  We’ve been told for decades that this train would whisk us from L.A. to San Francisco.  Instead, we have a dusty segment of track in the Central Valley that is currently 12 years behind schedule and billions over budget.  Even Maher – hardly a right-wing firebrand – had to tell him to “let the train go.”  When your own allies are telling you to pull the plug, you know the gears have completely stripped.

The Gas Pump Extortion: Energy Insecurity by Design
While Newsom stands on national television claiming California is “doing great,” the people of Fecal Creek are getting robbed every time they pull up to a pump.  If the Governor actually cared about the “working families” he mentions in every press release, he could drop the price of gas by over $1.20 per gallon tomorrow simply by suspending the state’s massive tax and regulatory burden.
But the price isn’t just a result of taxes; it’s the result of a fragile, sabotaged supply chain.  Following the arrival of the state’s last oil tanker from the Middle East yesterday, California is now facing a desperate test: how to replace 200,000 barrels of oil a day as the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz chokes off global supply.
Of course, we have plenty of oil right here in the Golden State, but for years, Sacramento has waged war on domestic production through slow permitting and bans on well stimulation.  Now, the bill has come due.  Industry leaders like Chevron and the California Independent Petroleum Association point out the obvious: by killing in-state drilling and driving out refineries – California has lost 18% of its refining capacity in just the last eight months – Newsom has made the state dangerously dependent on foreign tankers.
Rather than taking responsibility for these adversarial policies, Newsom is playing the blame game, pointing at federal foreign policy while we import 25% of our gasoline from overseas.  It’s the height of recklessness to outsource critical infrastructure to the Middle East and the Amazon while sitting on our own resources.  As the Western States Petroleum Association puts it, California’s economy depends on reliable fuel, but Sacramento has traded our energy security for ideological purity.

The Medi-Cal Mirage
Then there’s the blatant betrayal of the California taxpayer.  While our roads in Fecal Creek crumble and the middle class flees for the borders of Nevada and Texas, Newsom continues to bankrupt the state’s safety net.
The expansion of full-scope Medi-Cal to millions of illegal aliens is a calculated drain on a system already gasping for air.  We are looking at a Medi-Cal budget reaching an all-time high of $222 billion of the 2026-27 cycle.  While the Governor’s office tries to frame a $3 billion deficit as “manageable,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office is sounding the alarm on billions in “lost revenue” and rising per-enrollee costs.  We are footing the bill for a global charity ward while our own citizens struggle to find an affordable doctor.

The Empire of Fraud
They call it the “Empire of Fraud” for a reason.  From the staggering multibillion-dollar EDD scandal to the recent reports of $24 billion in homelessness spending that seemingly vanished into the ether, the corruption is baked into the machine.
California isn’t “doing great.”  It is a state where the elite play at progressivism while the working class in places like Fecal Creek pays for the privilege of watching their society decline.  Newsom sits on Maher’s couch and smiles, but don’t believe a word of it…reality for those of us actually here tells a different story: a story of a boondoggle train to nowhere, a manufactured energy crisis, and a healthcare system being sold out from under us.

Bonus Word of the Day: Boondoggle
(n.): a project that is considered a useless waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to political pride.  The California High-Speed Rail is the most expensive boondoggle in human history, funded by the sweat of the people in Fecal Creek. 

N.P.: “Beguiled” – The Smashing Pumpkins

I realize we’re staring down the barrel of a brutal summer, but find your solace here: we are officially halfway to Halloween!

N.P.: “Possum Kingdom” – Toadies

Listen.  You can almost hear the collective national sphincter unclench this morning, can’t you?  Yesterday, the Department of Justice – those gray-suited necromancers who’ve spent the last several decades trying to dress up capital punishment in the starched lab coat of medical theater, complete with IV drips and apologetic little heart monitors – has finally thrown in the towel on the whole lethal-injection charade and announced the return of the firing squad.  Not as some dusty historical footnote, not as a desperate last resort for the squeamish, but as an honest-to-God, federally sanctioned option again.  And if that doesn’t make every red-blooded American who still possesses a pulse want to stand up and salute with something sharper than a middle finger, then I don’t know what country you people think you’re living in.

It never should have been taken off the menu in the first place.  That much is axiomatic, self-evident, carved into the same granite slab of constitutional logic that lets us keep the Second Amendment around while simultaneously pretending the death penalty needs to be administered with all the dignity of a root canal.  We spent decades –decades, dear reader – watching condemned men twitch and gurgle under the fluorescent lights of some cinder-block execution chamber because some committee somewhere decided that bullets were “inhumane,” as if the humane thing to do was to pump a guy full of midazolam and pancuronium until he looked like a department-store mannequin having a quiet stroke.  The ontological dishonesty of it all was grotesque.  We wanted to kill them, sure, but we wanted to feel nice about it.  We wanted the paperwork to look like a hospital discharge summary.  We wanted the witnesses to go home without any unsightly arterial spray on their good shoes.   Pathetic.

The firing squad, by contrast, is pure, unadorned American honesty.  Five rifles.  One blank (or so the legend goes, though let’s be real: in practice nobody much cares).  A man strapped to a post, a white cloth over the heart like a bull’s-eye, and then the percussive thunderclap of synchronized justice.  Boom.  Done.  No lingering, no “oops the drugs didn’t mix right this time,” no appeals to the governor’s merciful conscience while the poor bastard lies there vegetable-adjacent for forty-five minutes.  Just the clean, final report of five government-issue rifles doing what they were built to do.  There’s a dignity in that, strange as it may sound to more delicate ears – a dignity that the lethal-injection crowd could never manage because they were too busy pretending they weren’t participants in the same ancient transaction of blood-for-blood that every civilization since Hammurabi has understood as the baseline cost of keeping the social contract from dissolving into cannibalism.

And while we’re here, let’s stop mincing around the obvious next logical step…at least in yrs. truly’s wine-dark psyche.

Put them on the White House lawn.

Not metaphorically.  Not in some fenced-off federal pen in Terre Haute where the only spectators are bored guards and a couple of teary-eyed, blue-haired, septum-pierced activists holding candle stubs.  No.  Drag the gurney or the post or the whatever-the-hell apparatus right out onto the South Lawn, under the same sky where they used to land Marine One and shake hands with visiting despots.  Let the networks run it live.  Hell…make it pay-per-view…I’d pay.  Let the tourists get their selfies with the muzzle flash still hanging in the air like cordite perfume.  Let the whole glittering spectacle of American power force the hoople-heads to confront the fact that sometimes the republic still has to do the wet work itself, in broad daylight, where the symbolism can’t be laundered through euphemism or outsourced to some pharmaceutical middleman in Indiana.

Because here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud while clutching their pearls and their oat-milk lattes: the death penalty isn’t broken because it’s violent.  It’s broken because we’ve spent half a century trying to pretend it isn’t violent.  We’ve tried to sterilize it, corporatize it, make it look like a medical procedure so we could sleep at night without acknowledging that the state is still in the business of ending human life when it decides the social contract has been irreparably breached.  The firing squad rips that polite fiction away.  It looks you in the eye.  It smells like gunpowder and inevitability.  And if that makes certain sectors of the commentariat clutch their therapy dogs and start bleating about “state-sanctioned murder,” well, you can fuck right off.  Get real. The state has been sanctioning murder – sorry, homicide – for centuries; it just used to have the stones to call it what it was and do it with a little theatrical flair.

So yeah.  Welcome back, old friend.  Welcome back, you beautiful, brutal, five-rifle symphony of finality.  The DOJ finally remembered that some tools were never meant to be retired – they were just waiting for the country to stop lying to itself about what it actually is.  Now somebody get the groundskeepers to hose off the lawn.  We’ve got work to do.

N.P.: “Down In The Park” – Marilyn Manson

Out in the natural world, red ants and black ants can live near each other, but they will not intermingle.  The create separate colonies, and aggression between the two groups is minimal or absent.  In other words, they tolerate each other naturally.

If you take these same red and black ants and put them into a jar, one might think they immediately fight.  However, one would be wrong.  The ants investigate each other briefly via antennal contact (which reads chemical cues), then resume their normal individual behavior.  One would see parallel activity; two independent systems occupying the same space without merging.  This reflects what ecological studies call coexistence without cooperation, which mirror their behaviors outside the jar, in the wild.  This coexistence will continue in perpetuity.

If one were to shake the hell out of the jar, however, one would create overcrowding, overheating, and a limiting of escape routes, thus increasing stress in all of the ants.  Under stress, ants release alarm pheromones (often including formic acid).  At that point, ants misidentify any non-nestmates as threats, and they immediately turn aggressive and attack one another: the red ones try to kill the black ones, and vice-versa.

Of course, it never occurs to the ants to ask who in the hell it was that shook the jar.  This fails to occur to them, of course, because they are micro-brained insects incapable of abstract thought or critical thinking.  They are literally slaves to their nest’s hive-mind.

A rhetorical question: what do slave-minded ants and modern white liberals have in common?

Ponder that as we come to today’s sermon: The SPLC Indictment: A $3 Million Hate-Money Laundering Operation That Funded the Very Monsters It Pretended to Slay, While the Dupes Cheered from the Sidelines Like Trained Seals.

It lands like a brick through the plate-glass window of every carefully curated narrative the coastal commentariat has been peddling for the better part of a decade: on April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, handed down an eleven-count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center – the self-anointed high priests of the American hate industry – with wire fraud, false statements to federally insured banks, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.  Between 2014 and 2023, according to the Department of Justice, this 501(c)(3) behemoth secretly shoveled more than three million donor dollars (your liberal aunt’s white-guilt-tinged twenty bucks after the latest NPR pledge drive, multiplied by the hundreds of thousands) straight into the pockets of individuals tied to the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Party of America, and – most deliciously, most grotesquely – one of the actual architects of the 2017 Charlottesville Unit the Right rally, to the tune of roughly $270,000 over eight years.  Not “monitoring.”  Not “infiltrating.”  Funding.  Paying.  Amplifying.  Keeping the Klan’s lights on and the tiki torches lit so the SPLC could turn around, wring its hands in performative anguish, and mail out another six-figure fundraising letter shrieking that the apocalypse was upon us and only a monthly donation could hold back the rising tide of whiteness.

Charlottesville, says the DOJ, wasn’t an eruption.  It was a line item.  A budgeted, calendared, pre-written morality play where the casting call went out to the only five actual Klansmen left in a tri-county area, plus a few dozen role-players who couldn’t get callbacks for community theater, all so the cameras would have something to point at while the fundraising emails wrote themselves.  The real money went to the amplification: the press-release pipeline, the “hate map”™ that plotted every Rotary Club with a Gadsden flag as a Fourth Reich cell, and the special bull rate for smearing anyone to the right of David Brooks as an “extremist” – your dad, your priest, the lady who runs the PTA and thinks maybe third-graders shouldn’t be taught about intersectional pronoun matrices.

This is not metaphor.  This is the goddamn indictment, filed in open court, with forfeiture actions attached like the cherry on a shit sundae.  The very organization that built an empire by slapping the “hate group” label on everyone from the above-mentioned school-board parent who dared question the latest rainbow curriculum to your mildly libertarian uncle who still votes Republican because he likes lower taxes and the Second Amendment – this same outfit was, the feds now allege, in the business of manufacturing the very extremism it claimed to oppose.  They didn’t just cry wolf; they bred the wolves, collared them, and walked them on a diamond-studded leash across every cable-news chyron in America.  And then they cashed the checks.

One pauses – because one must, if only for the sake of not having one’s skull explode from the sheer vertiginous hypocrisy – to consider the scale of the grift.  The SPLC’s “hate map”™, that glossy interactive dashboard of American darkness, became gospel in newsrooms, HR departments, and federal law-enforcement briefings alike.  Moderately conservative voices – think tank writers, campus speakers, even the occasional literary blogger who thought maybe, just maybe, color-blindness was still a defensible ideal – found themselves tarred as “extremists” in the same breath that the SPLC was quietly wiring cash to actual card-carrying Klansmen.  The rhetorical sleight-of-hand was breathtaking in its audacity: inflate the threat, smear the center-right as adjacent to it, rake in the donations from terrified liberals who’d rather die than be called racist, and repeat.  A closed circuit of manufactured moral panic…self-sustaining, tax-exempt, and now, apparently, criminal.

And here is where the real sickness sets in – not the fraud itself (though the fraud is Olympic-gold-level vile), but the behavior of the dimwitted, self-satisfied dupes on the left who swallowed the whole poisonous liturgy without so much as a hiccup of skepticism.  The grift doesn’t work without the marks.  And here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we find the slack-jawed credentialed class who swallowed the whole op like it was free-range kombucha.  These are the same people who will correct your pronunciation of “Qatar: but can’t tell a federal filing from a fundraising email.  They took the hoax – the whole Potemkin-village of systemic-racism-now-playing-at-a-theater-near-you – and mainlined it straight into the discourse, then used it as a rhetorical blackjack against their own neighbors.

They weren’t just fooled.  They were eager.  Eager to believe, eager to scold, eager to turn every Thanksgiving into a Maoist struggle session because the SPLC sent them a PDF that said the turkey was colonizer-coded.  They let themselves get played like a Salvation Army keyboard, banging out the same three-note melody of “America is Evil” while the people selling the sheet music bought another compound in the Caribbean.  They demanded you “do the work” while doing none of it themselves, unless you count retweeting a graphic of a fist and called it praxis.

I know you know the type, dear reader.  The ones who spent 2017 through 2024 walking around with the haunted, righteous glaze of the true believer, convinced that half the country was one wrong tweet away from goose-stepping through their neighborhood.  The performative outrage merchants who turned every campus speaker invitation into a referendum on whether the republic could survive another word from a guy who thought affirmative action had run its course.  The ones who, when presented with actual data showing that interracial crime rates and police shootings and every other metric the professional grievance class loved to wave around were not, in fact, evidence of some vast, invisible Jim Crow 2.0, simply doubled down and called the data “white supremacist.”  These pitiful pawns – simple-minded, incurious, terminally online – allowed themselves to be used as the human shields and rhetorical cudgels in a cynical race-hoax economy that had no basis in anything resembling institutional or systemic racism as it actually existed in the America of the 2020s.  No vast white-supremacist power structure.  No invisible hand of the market rigged exclusively against melanin.  Just a handful of aging Klansmen, some online edgelords, and a massive nonprofit that discovered the grift of the century: scare the liberals, fund the racists, pocket the difference.

It is the sort of grotesque, perverse, almost pornographic hypocrisy that makes one want to laugh and vomit at the same time, preferably while mainlining black coffee and cheap bourbon at 3 a.m. in a motel room somewhere off I-40, string at the indictment PDF glowing on a laptop screen like the face of God finally deciding to show up and render judgement.  The left’s useful idiots didn’t just get played; they paid to get played.  They cheered while the con artists ran the long con.  They divided the country on explicitly racial lines – family against family, neighbor against neighbor – on the basis of a fiction the SPLC itself was subsidizing.  And now, with the feds finally kicking in the door, one can almost hear the distant sound of laptops snapping shut and blue-check accounts going dark as the realization dawns, slow and terrible, that the emperor wasn’t just naked – he was wearing a Klan hood underneath the robes and laughing all the way to the offshore account.

The rest of us?  We always knew it reeked of bullshit.  We just never expected the bull to be this well-financed.

Welcome to the end of the grift, dear reader.  The wolves were never at the door.  They were on the payroll.  And the dupes weren’t just the audience.  They were the business model.  They bought the ticket, and they took the ride.  Now the carousel has crashed, the lights are on, and the DOJ is sweeping up the shattered remains of the biggest cultural con of the century.  We are left standing in the debris, staring at a landscape divided by a phantom menace, wondering just how long the collective hangover of the willfully ignorant is going to last.

N.P.: “Black or White” – Small Town Titans

The Machine That Forgets Its Name

The body wakes each morning like a factory restarting after a blackout — gears coughing, lights flickering, the smell of ozone and unfinished dreams.

Outside, the horizon hums with the sound of something enormous pretending to be eternal. Birds trace equations in the air that never balance.

Every breath feels borrowed from a stranger who never asked for it back. We polish our reflections as if the glass might someday remember us. We build monuments out of seconds, stacking them carefully, hoping the architecture of repetition will trick the void into applause.

But the machine keeps running. It doesn’t care who’s inside. It doesn’t care if the music stops. It only wants motion — the slow grind of existence turning itself into dust.

And when the lights finally dim, there’s no curtain call, no audience, just the faint click of the universe resetting its clock and whispering, again.

N.P.: “Confusion Illusion” – Solar Fields

Throwin’ up the set again today, dear reader.  I know you Get It, but there a couple of folks who frequent this website and  get all consternated and grouchy and bitch at me when I do this.

So listen.

You sit there in the flickering blue light of whatever screen you’ve chosen as your personal electronic pacifier, doom-scrolling through the usual carnival of performative outrage and algorithmic horseshit, and somewhere in the back of your reptile brain you still feel it, don’t you?  I know you must – the low, electric hum of something bigger than your mortgage, bigger that your politics, bigger than the latest flavor of ideological syphilis that’s eating the culture from the inside out.  That hum is the United States Armed Forces pulling two of their own – a pilot and a Weapon Systems Officer, call signs irrelevant because the only thing that matters is they were alive and behind enemy lines – out of the meat grinder of hostile territory like it was just another Tuesday.  And right alongside that hum, louder still, is the bone-rattling thunder of Artemis II’s crew riding a pillar of American fire farther into the black than any human beings have ever gone before, looping around the moon and staring straight into the face of the infinite with the same calm, psychotic competence that used to define test pilots and moonwalkers and every other magnificent bastard who ever looked at the horizon and said, Yeah, I’ll take that too. 

The rescue itself was the sort of operation that makes you understand why the rest of the world still whispers the phrase American special operations the way medieval peasants used to whisper dragon.  Night-vision, rotor wash, suppressed weapons, the whole lethal ballet executed with the kind of surgical swagger that looks, from the outside, like pure fucking magic and, from the inside, like months of rehearsals, contingency plans stacked on contingency plans, and the absolute refusal to leave anybody behind.  The pilot and the WSO – two men who climbed into a jet knowing full well the sky might try to kill them – got yanked back into friendly hands while the people who wanted them dead were still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.  No press conference grandstanding, no made-for-TV speeches.  Just the quiet, terrifying efficiency of professionals who treat “impossible” the way the rest of us treat “Tuesday.”  You want competence porn?  This is it.  This is the real thing.  The kind that doesn’t need hashtags.

And then – Christ – Artemis II.

While the rest of the idiots of the species were busy arguing about pronouns and carbon offsets and whether the latest celebrity had the correct opinion on the Epstein files, four American  in a capsule built by American hands and American sweat rode the most powerful rocket ever launched by anyone, anywhere, and went farther than Apollo ever did.  Farther.  Let that sink in.  We didn’t just repeat history; we lapped it.  They crossed the translunar injection point, they looped the moon, they looked down at the pale blue dot that contains every war, every love song, every petty grievance we’ve ever had, and they did it while the whole planet watched like it was the goddamn Super Bowl.  The courage required is almost obscene.  Not the cartoon courage of movies.  The real kind: the kind that sits in a tin can on top of several million pounds of explosives and says, Light the fucking candle.

And here’s the part that makes the professional hand-wringers and the campus revolutionaries and the professional anti-Americans start clutching their pearls and muttering darkly about “militarism” and “nationalism” and whatever other ten-dollar words they’ve been taught to use as substitutes for actual thought: both of these things – the rescue and the flight – happened because this country, for all its flaws and contradictions and self-inflicted wounds, still produced people who are willing to strap themselves into machines of incomprehensible power and risk everything so the rest of us don’t have to.  They do it without asking for your approval.  They do it without caring whether the latest TikTok moralist thinks it’s “problematic.”  They do it because that’s who they are.

You can sneer if you want.  You can post your little memes about the military-industrial complex or the evils of space colonization or whatever fashionable nihilism is trending this week.  You can pretend that greatness is passé, that competence is suspect, that the only authentic response to human achievement is a knowing, ironic deconstruction.  Fine.  But when the rotors thump in the dark and the rocket lights the sky like the wrath of God, those noises don’t give a single shit about your deconstruction.  They just happen.  And they happen here, under this flag, because we still – barely, miraculously – have the balls and the brains and the sheer goddamn nerve to make them happen.

If those two things don’t make you want to go out front and wave an American flag, I simply don’t know what kind of anti-American pussy you are, but if we’re ever at the same bar, you’re paying for your own lukewarm rosé or Bud Light or kombucha or whatever your kind is drinking these days.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stand outside and look up at the sky like a goddamn lunatic, because somewhere out there four Americans are still farther away from the rest of us than any humans have ever been, and somewhere down here two more of us just got dragged back from the jaws of the enemy by the best people this country still knows how to make.

And for one incandescent moment, the republic doesn’t feel like it’s dying.

It feels like it’s just getting started.

N.P.: “Do You Ever Get Tired?” – King Willonius

Here’s the thing about the festering American culture in this otherwise glorious year of 2026: it’s not just bad – it’s aggressively, unapologetically, soul-suckingly bad.  It’s like the collective consciousness of this country woke up one morning, decided to mainline Mountain Dew Code Red, and then just never stopped.  The people?  Trash.  The way they dress?  Trash.  The way they speak?  Trash.  It’s like they’ve all agreed to participate in some kind of unspoken performance art piece called How Low Can We Go?  Spoiler alert: they’re still digging.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, dear new reader: “Oh, but who are you to judge?”  Well, let me stop you right there, Scooter.  I am exactly the person to judge.  I’ve got a PhD in Judgmental Arts with a minor in Not Giving a Fuck.  While the rest of you are out here clutching your pearls and wringing your hands over whether it’s “okay” to have an opinion about the human trainwrecks around you, I’m over here with a megaphone and a lawn chair and a handle of Jack, narrating the carnage like it’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  I judge with the serene, almost monastic clarity of a man who has accepted his role as a cultural executioner.  On any given day, I let the judgement flow like some Old Testament river of fire, cleansing the land of Crocs and linguistic incompetence.

My criteria for judgment are simple, elegant, and ruthlessly effective.  First, your ability to drive.  If you can’t merge without causing a 12-car pileup or you think the left lane is for leisurely Sunday strolls, or you enter some sort of weird contemplative mode for a while after the light turns green, you’re already on my list.  Second, your command of the English language.  If you can’t string together a coherent sentence that doesn’t start with “I feel like,” you’re dead to me.  And if you’re one of those people who says “irregardless” or “I could care less,” congratulations, you’ve just won a one-way ticket to damnation in my personal hellscape.

But let’s say you manage to avoid those two pitfalls.  Maybe you’re a decent driver.  Maybe you can conjugate a verb without breaking into a sweat.  Good for you.  But here’s the rub: I still have to look at you.  And statistically speaking, if you’re in California, you’re probably wearing pajamas and Crocs in public, which means you’ve already failed.  I mean, come on.  Pajamas?  In public?  What are you, an incontinent toddler?  And Crocs?  Goddammit!  They’re not shoes; they’re a cry for help.  If you’re out here shuffling around in those rubber abominations, you might as well tattoo “I’ve totally given up” on your forehead and call it a day.

This is not mere sloth; this is ideology made sartorial.  The pandemic apparently gave permission, sure – everyone retreated into loungewear as if comfort were the final civil right – but what stuck was the refusal to re-emerge.  Why put on real pants when the republic itself has decided that effort is optional, that dignity is a luxury good, that the only remaining public performance is the performance of not caring?  Airports now host earnest (and occasional satirical) debates about whether pajamas should be banned outright; Transportation Secretaries issue gentle scoldings about “dressing with respect” while the nation collectively yawns and adjusts its drawstring waistband.  Tampa International Airport even joked about outlawing the combo – pajamas plus Crocs – as if humor could shame what shame itself has already abandoned.

And don’t think I didn’t notice the vape.  Oh, I noticed.  You’re not fooling anyone with that little USB stick of shame.  You’re out here puffing clouds of artificially flavored despair like a dragon whose given up on hoarding gold and decided to hoard crippling insecurity instead.  Mango Tango?  Fuck off.  That’s the hill you’re dying on?  Go ahead, blow your sad little smoke rings and pretend you’re cool.  Meanwhile, I’ll be over here, judging you from the moral high ground, which, incidentally, smells like bourbon and victory.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way.  Once upon a time, we had standards.  We had style.  We had dignity.  Now?  Now we’ve got people wearing Snuggies to the grocery store and calling it “self-expression.”  We’ve got influencers who can’t spell “influencer” telling us how to live our lives.  We’ve got a culture that celebrates mediocrity and calls it authenticity.  And the worst part?  Most of you seem fine with it.  You’ve accepted the trash.  You’ve embraced the trash.  You’ve become the trash.

Well, not me.  I refuse.  I will not go gently into that good landfill.  I will rage, rage against the dying of the taste.  And if that makes me a snob, so be it.  Better a snob than a slob.  So go ahead, America.  Keep wearing your jammies.  Keep vaping your Mango Tango.  Keep butchering the English language like it owes you money.  Just know that somewhere out there, I, and others like me, are watching.  And we’re judging.

N.P.: “I’m Afraid of Americans – Nine Inch Nails V1 Mix” – David Bowie