Prickly City by Scott Stantis for November 24, 2021

The muse of plumbing!

Obama!? Bush needs to be on that list.

Don’t forget the gross rise of right-wing populism, Stanti. You know, the movement tied to global nationalism, hate, anti-vaxxing, ignorance, trump, the strange love of Putin, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte, Kyle Rittenhouse, Stephen Paddock, Alex Jones, the dead anti-vaxxer radio hosts, Jair Bolsonaro, denial of global warming, false cries of election stealing, book burning, Q Anon, ……………………….anyone want to add to this, I’m sure we can go all day long.

I don’t remember any claims of the “end of history” at the end of the 20th Century. Am I forgetting, or is Mr. Stantis fantasizing?

Points for giving us an obscure Greek demigod… on that note, we might remember that Athens’ golden age was followed by Alexander, eventually giving way to the brutal Roman empire. Liberalism, and globalism, produced the tempered Capitalist model; freedom to accumulate wealth with protection from exploitation by the owners of Capital. Globalism, which benefits the whole, was understood by academics to require that the whole in turn support those it displaced. Republicans, unfortunately, prevented that support, then blamed Democrats for globalism. Their sophisticated marketing machine then harvested the displaced that they had produced to swell the ranks of their voters. Michelle Goldberg’s despair is not misplaced…

Yes, it can be a verb; but can it be transitive.

It’s English, we verb anything.

The muse is not amused.

She just needs a little liquid fortification. (What vintage? A muse can tell.)

Yes but only intransitively

Calvin: “Verbing weirds language.”

Hobbes: “Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.”

Like the Great Recession, them wars JUST HAPPENED. Right, Stantis?

History won’t end for a long time even if there is no one to mark it.