I tried quoting FP Dunne’s ‘Aggy-naldo’ lines in another blog (“We want none of yer canned democracy here… whatever Mr. Armour sez, we fear its freshness may have suffered durin’ the long sea-voyage… we prefer our democracy home-cooked, sich as Mither used to make, even if it is too coo-arse for yer standards.”) and was told that FPD’s self-protective dialect is too hard on modern sensiblities. Were I to win the lottery, and assuming that FPD’s work is now out of copyright, I’d set myself the task of republishing a non-dialectic version of Mr. Dooley’s Greatest Hits. Barring that, I look forward to reading your book someday!

As for the recreation of the 19th Century kleptocrat economy, Bush and Rove have done wonders here, too. Pressed for time but google “uggabugga” and “19th Century Bush”, and marvel at the attempted, and laregly successful rollback of the Progressive Era, which was naturally the next target of the reactionary right after Reagan, at least in the American psyche, rolledback the New Deal.

My long-time book idea, going on for three years now, has been to write on this analogy, and do side-by-side profiles of the Bush regime and its enablers next to McKinley’s and his. Root, Hay, Lodge, TR, Beveridge, Josiah Strong, Taft, Mahan, Brooks Adams corresponding roughly to Cheney, Condi, Gingrich, McCain, Lieberman, Pat Robertson, Bremer, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz.

It’s hard for a lifelong contrarian to remain on the “outside” of The Conventional Wisdom if there has been any social progress during his or her lifetime. In Timothy McVeigh, Vidal’s bedrock affection for the neglected Appalachian virtues of his childhood, and for the men who grew up immersed in those virtues, collided and colluded with his suspicion of the current political establishment’s “Easy Answers for Hard Questions” practices. Remember, Vidal was questioning the Warren Commission’s report and Arthur Bremmer’s role as George Wallace’s would-be assassin long before McVeigh discovered the Michigan Militia… he has never been a fan of the Lone Gunman theory of American politics.

And, to be honest, Gore is far from the only historian to raise the possibility that Teddy R’s vaunted Huntin’ & Shootin’ & Sayin’ Rude Words persona reeked of what we now call over-compensation. Read Finley Peter Dunne’s review of Teddy’s Rough Rider autobiography (an early example of political self-promotion via authorship) if you want to see Snark As It Should Be Done: Teddy never forgave Dunne for branding his beloved tome “Alone In Cuba, by Myself, Teddy Roosevelt”, a barb so true that a young socialite was said to have congratulated the less-than-amused TR for its success under that title!

Incidentally — am I the only person here who wonders why the latest news keeps paralleling so neatly the politics, and the personas, that F.P. Dunne mocked during the Gilded Age? I know Karl Rove wanted to re-create the realm of “Billy Mack” McKinley, but why do so many otherwise functional adults want to assist him in this endeavor? Have none of them ever heard the aphorism about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce?

Fucking wankers.

LIES!

don’t you know all the yuppies go to “the cell” now?

The inability to grasp irony has reached epidemic levels on the right.

My stepfather, who I love dearly, is a hardcore Republican. We argue, but it’s generally civil. Anyway, when Cheney shot that lawyer, it was during a “canned hunt” of birds. My stepfather was the first person to say how disgusting that is, that it isn’t hunting, it’s torturing animals. Because he’s gone hunting. Sitting in the woods in autumn, cold, wet, and waiting for a deer to cross your path–that’s hunting. Taking the deer, having it butchered, and then eating the meat–that’s hunting. Hell, that’s winter food where I grew up (rural PA). Fishing on the shore; hunting in the woods; not this sick “guaranteed kill” bullshit; hell, I don’t even like stocked ponds.

Yuppie is the right word for it, no doubt.

I’m not a vegetarian, though when I have the money I’d rather buy free-range/organic meat than not. I don’t have any qualms about eating animals, but damn–this is basically torturing an animal.

And there are some real gems, too. This fucking slayed me. I’m still crying, it was so good:

“hello, your face doesn’t fit your head”

lofl

It’s actually a decent argument against the subtleties of Darwinian natural selection when fat fuckhead redneck shitbags are able to kill animals that should really be chasing them short distances and eating their entrails. Give it a few years, and one will hope that rhinos learn how to plant IEDs.

Exactly.

I’ve hunted, some aspects I liked and some I didnt — frogging was fun, pretty much everything else is tedious. The one time I went deer hunting, I took a morphine tablet, sipped on Apricot brandy, enjoyed the snowfall, and took a potshot at a turkey (an albino — how could I resist?) and missed, but mostly I sat there stoned, reading Dumas.

But I own a gun. I need one out here, especially if one has pets or farm animals. I shoot pests like groundhogs and squirrels. This is not sport, it’s simply life in these conditions. OTOH, venison is delicious shit and I’ll take a freezer full anytime, thanks.

In the winter, though, this area turns into yuppie central, suburban fuckheads with money running out their asses and little sense paying outrageous money to freeze their balls off in a duck hole. Morons. This is the flyway, and much of the time it’s like shooting fish in a barrell. The yuppies get their limit, then return to a cabin to drink single malt and talk about stocks.

The guides function then as crude purveyors of bullshit testosterone for the suburban fucks who feel manly by shooting everything that moves. Not, unfortunately, being much of a traveller, I used to be confused and disgusted by the certain antipathy of “other” people to bloody tourists, but now I begin to see the point.

It is a paradox, then, just as in country music in that the more authenticity these posers seek, the more plastic they seem to the observer. Of course, I dont think all that much of authentic country, having spent my life reacting against that lifestyle, but at least it has the virtue of being fucking REAL. Genuine bullshit is bad enough even though, as a wise man said, it does have its own sort of integrity. But FAKE bullshit? Gah. Artifice can be fun, especially considering that life is meanngless and boring, but my god, pick something worthy to be pretentious about! Redneck culture is not worth faking, except for purposes of parody.

Canned hunts, shee. I grew up hunting deer, raccoon, squirrel and other various assorted varmits with my old man. I never did really like it that much and never did that much damage to the local wildlife, but it was about the only place me and the old man were able to relate to one another. My old man’s a real Gary Cooper type, taciturn as all get out. A friend of my uncle’s once invited us on a “canned hunt” – the guaranteed-kill type, fenced-in deal – and the poor bastard never quite grasped the deep loathing contained in my father’s polite refusal.

Fuckin’ yuppies.