There Was a Sadness in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)
WASHINGTON - I have seen political wakes in my day. I have been to many a "time," as the old-school Boston pols call any event at which liquor is available and at which money changes hands, which included paying respects to the deceased, whom you'd hated in life with the heat of the Yellowstone caldera.
When they brought John McCain's casket into the rotunda of the Capitol on Friday, however, the formal ceremony was as tight and rigid as a Mike Pence erotic fantasy. The Majority Leader of the Senate, the Speaker of the House, and the vice-president* of the United States all spoke and they were all terrible. After Joe Biden's bravura performance in Arizona on Thursday, and with Aretha Franklin's glorious, rambunctious funeral rites rocking the other half of the teevee screen, these three jamokes proceeded to deliver three of the most perfunctory, and most fundamentally insincere addresses to which the rotunda's statues ever have been witness. The worst of them all was Pence, who actually named He Who Must Not Be Named, which prompted a volcanic glare from Meghan McCain, who was sitting behind him.
The President asked me to be here on behalf of a grateful nation, to pay a debt of honor and respect to a man who served our country throughout his life, in uniform and in public office. It's my great honor to be here. In the long history of our nation, only 30 Americans have lain in state here in the United States Capitol rotunda.
This, of course, is an arrant lie. John McCain arranged his funeral to get up in the president*'s grill, and the president* knows it, which is why he's at Camp David this weekend, brooding and sweating and trying not to tweet something about McCain that one day will send him spiraling to an even lower circle of hell than the one for which he's had a reservation since about 1972.
But his support for limited government, for tax reform, and support for our armed forces surely left our nation more prosperous and more secure. And he will be missed. As President Trump said yesterday, we respect his service to the country.
This was an occasion of great solemnity. People were lost in thought and in memories. Some people were crying. Generals and admirals were standing at attention. You were standing amid statues of Lincoln and Grant and Martin Luther King, Jr. Nobody was thinking about fcking tax reform, you sad, programmable dolt. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan edged a bit closer to genuine emotion than did Pence, but you know that whatever conscience still quivers in their souls was cramping up on them terribly. Whatever John McCain's political principles were that have been the subject of so much praise, McConnell and Ryan and Pence have sold them out cheap to a petty, vindictive tyrant who doesn't know anything about anything.
The event didn't have a real soul to it until they opened the rotunda to the general public a few hours after the formalities were over. Ordinary citizens, baked by a summer's day that made you curse Alexander Hamilton for cutting a deal to put the national capital here, walked by in a steady parade. Some of them just circled the perimeter. Others stood along the velvet ropes that surrounded the casket, which had been placed on the same catafalque that once had borne the bodies of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy. Celebrities blended in with the hot polloi; Dave Chappelle, a Washington native, drifted through the rotunda and hardly anyone batted an eye.
You found yourself wondering-what will they do when this president* dies? I mean, he gets a portrait and a library; even Nixon got those after resigning in disgrace. Will one day a casket containing his mortal remains get propped up on Lincoln's old death-stage? What will the rites be? Who will attend? World leaders? Mike Pence will be there, surely, with something appropriate to the occasion to say about the genius of tariffs. The president* is the president, for the moment anyway, and he is in the line of history, and there is nothing anyone can do about that now.
There was a sadness in the rotunda like there is after a bad storm. The people in line blinked like survivors.
As most regulars here at the shebeen know, I am a child of the alternative press. I learned my chops at the late Boston Phoenix between the years 1978 and 1983. So it's with a heavy heart that I learned that the Village Voice is no more.The Voice was the grandparent of them all, and I can remember being in the Phoenix newsroom and grappling for that week's Voice to read Alex Cockburn and Jim Ridgeway on politics and the press, and then Geoffrey Stokes on the latter and tennis, Ellen Willis on Dylan and Marx and everything in between, James Wolcott on pretty much anything, and Jill Nelson on stuff I never knew anything about.
Then there was Wayne Barrett, who was wise to a certain major real-estate grifter before anyone else and tried to warn the country and then Wayne died the day before the grifter was inaugurated as president* of the United States. (He was, as Wayne memorably put it, "a user of other users.") The Voice itself now has died in its 60th year. Well-done, old fella. You had a great run.
My god, what's it going to take? Garlic and a crucifix? A wooden stake? From Politico:
Penn has now become a regular face on Fox News-CNN and MSNBC won’t book him-and a contributor to The Hill’s right-leaning editorial pages. There, he has repeatedly bashed the Mueller investigation as a “partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again”-followed up by more TV hits on Fox. And despite the photos that decorate his office walls, he has willingly torched the Clintons, saying the Justice Department “broke their own rules” by ending an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, and noting that “Clinton Foundation operatives” urged the FBI to investigate Trump.
The Undead walk among us, howling for blood and getting booked on the teehee.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "I Ate Up The Apple Tree"(Pin Stripe Brass Band): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is the state funeral of Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein and first president of the Irish Free State. Something strange is going on with the camera there at the end. Griffith died suddenly, probably from the combined strain of negotiating the treaty with Great Britain that established the Free State, and managing the civil war that treaty touched off. Anyway, Michael Collins led the funeral procession to Glasnevin and, within 10 days, he was dead, too. History is so cool.
Before we leave Dublin, I have to say that I'm all-in for Tyrone and the upset in Sunday's All-Ireland football final. But I don't see any way short of an intervention by the Presbyterian deity that they can pull it off. The Dubs are just too good and, yes, it kills me to say that. But I do get to root for the Kerry minorsto pull of the five in a row, this year against Galway. The future looks bright. I always say that.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, ScienceNews? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Ellisdale, the diversity of this dinosaur group is evinced by the fossils. After viewing the theropod bones and teeth from Ellisdale stored at the New Jersey State Museum, Brownstein concluded that perhaps four different species are represented at the site, one of the most diverse faunas of these dinosaurs known from east of the Mississippi River. Tyrannosaurs distantly related to T. rex are known from teeth and a single foot bone. The teeth recovered may indicate the presence of two types of these large carnivores in the ecosystem. Another type of dinosaur that resembled an ostrich known as an ornithomimosaur is represented by a single foot bone. One particularly interesting finding is that several teeth previously recognized as those of tyrannosaurs are in fact those of giant dromaeosaurid, or ‘raptor,’ dinosaurs potentially more than 13 feet (4 m) long.
It seems that, with rare common sense, dinosaurs largely avoided New Jersey, as well as most of the East Coast. (Traffic, cost of living, schools. You know the drill.) Except for this one spot where big carnivores did dwell.
“For one, the Ellisdale assemblage of theropod dinosaurs is the only one known from the northeast that overlaps in age with sites from both the southeastern U.S. and western North America, allowing us to better compare dinosaur faunas from across the entire continent.”
“Sites like Ellisdale, although they do not produce anything along the lines of the complete skeletons known from Asia and western North America, should not be overlooked. They are a great asset to the study of paleontology because of their ability to produce fossils at all in fossil-poor regions, allowing for glimpses at the places whose deep past has been so greatly obscured.”
New Jersey, of course, has been home to top-end predators of all species for a while now. Some of these are fossilized and some of them are just doing time, but the dinosaurs of New Jersey lived then to make us happy now.
The Committee's sweet-tooth for free association is well-known, so it was a stone-cold lock that Top Commenter Frank Armstrong would be named Top Commenter of the Week for his rendition of the president*'s shilling for fast food...in space!
And the chicken is on fire! Stupid chicken! Fake coleslaw! I am very excited by the grease! Best grease ever! Failing CNN got it wrong-still finger lickin' good! The walls are breathing! Colors everywhere! It's the mother ship! It's the mother ship! God bless our bodily fluids!"
The Committee awards 4.2 extra Beckhams for the Strangelove reference for a total of 84.56. Well-struck, good sir.
Hey, next week is Kavanaugh Week! Expect a lot of car-pooling stories. Also, down here, there's a rising feeling that the clock is ticking loudly towards Mueller Time. But, hell, it's Labor Day weekend. Pour a few out for the people who made it possible, and for the people who still work at it today. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and now join in with Ms. Reese, y'all.
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