A blog by Dan Brooks
Not on there
Andrew Dice Clay
Steven Miller of the Steve Miller Band
Sir Mix-a-Lot (British?)
Rudyard Kipling
The Riddler
The guy who wrote “beer before liquor, never been sicker”
Dr. Seuss (Jewish?)
Anonymous
Chris Christie
A lowly scribe
Once again, there is very little Combat! blog today, because I must hit deadline after deadline. It was my understanding that writing for a living would mostly involve wearing a big sweater and drinking coffee. That’s true, I guess, but they also make you type like a mother. I have typed away my whole day, or at least my ability to compose within it, and now I must rest. While I slumber, feed, and try to defeat whatever virus I contracted on the plane, how about you read this story about the president-elect claiming, without evidence, that the vote was rigged. I’m trying not to nurse the absurd fantasy that recounts will undo the results of this month’s election. If they did, it might arguably be worse for the country than an actual Trump presidency. But to think that our chief executive will spend the next four years Just Sayin’ Stuff on Twitter—and through goodness-know-what official organs—is to stand at the edge of the abyss. We’ll be back tomorrow with something else—anything else. Oh god.
Comet Ping Pong in Washington, DC
There is very little Combat! blog today, because I am about to get on a plane for the third week in a row. While I submit to the tender mercies of United Airlines, how about you consider that we may have finally broken democracy? Thanks to fake news stories and social-media conspiracy theorists, thousands of people now believe that Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, DC, is the headquarters of a child sex-trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton. The owner and his staff have been getting death threats, and they’ve seen their children’s pictures used as photos of victims in fabricated stories like Pizzagate: How 4Chan Unconvered the Sick World of Washington’s Occult Elite. Don’t search #pizzagate on Twitter unless you want to lose faith in the American experiment. It’s possible that we have failed to teach millions of people the critical thinking skills necessary to function in civil society. Everyone had to be this dumb in the early 19th century, before the advent of public schools. But could they share their dumb ideas this effectively? Perhaps the analog here is not present citizens:past citizens but present publishers:past publishers. Everyone may have been dumber in the 1830s, but they were not the editors of their own newspapers. O brave new world.
The day after we deported the last illegal immigrant, America was not yet great again. That’s to be expected. Even though illegal immigrants had been causing a lot of problems, something as complex as the United States isn’t going to turn around overnight. We’re talking about a whole, complicated system. It would take a while for the job creators to restaff the illegal immigrant’s old, illegal jobs with working-class white people. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
But then, on the anniversary of the day we deported the last illegal immigrant, America still wasn’t great. The factories hadn’t opened up again, and houses cost about the same as they did before. They were still too slow at the doctor’s office. The busboys were all white teenagers with no sense at all, but otherwise, little had changed.
We figured something must have gone wrong, and it didn’t take long to figure out what. Even though we had gotten rid of the illegals, there were still a bunch of legal immigrants who were basically the same people. They came from the same places. They looked and talked the same way: different. The only difference between an illegal immigrant and a legal immigrant is a piece of paper, and that’s no difference at all. When you’re tackling a project as big as making America great again, you have to tell it like it is. Anybody who says otherwise is just being politically correct.
So we deported all the legal immigrants, too. Anybody who wasn’t born here was out. We figured that would make America great again. But after a year or so, everything was still about the same. If anything, the doctor’s office got even slower, and there were a lot fewer restaurants. But the big stuff—jobs, terrorism, that overall feeling that everything was getting worse—hardly changed at all. All we did was spend a billion dollars on trains.
Then we realized what it was: Even though we had gotten rid of all the immigrants, their kids were still here. Technically, they were born in America. But everybody knows that if your parents are from Mexico or Syria, you’re not going to learn American values. You’re going to learn what they teach you. All those people were running around keeping America from being great, acting like this was their country just because they grew up here. And then they turn around and indoctrinate their kids!
It was a real problem, so to make America great again, we deported people whose parents or grandparents were immigrants. A lot of people didn’t have their grandparents’ birth certificates, and some didn’t even know who all of their grandparents were, so we deported them, too, just to be safe. Now everyone in America is an American, and it’s going to be great. I mean, what else could the problem be?
Remember when this guy was the worst-case scenario?
There is no Combat! blog today, because Jodi and I are flying to Salt Lake City to see Curt in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. I saw that shit at the Kennedy Center, but we’re doing it all again, because I am a Beautiful: The Carole King Musical superfan, at least as long as Curt is in it. While I prepare to critique another lighting design, how about you read this terrifying article from Buzzfeed, which found that fake news outperformed real news on Facebook during the last three months of the election. We always worry about the legal half of democracy being usurped by some tyrannical government, but we rarely talk about the social half—the informed citizenry that makes democracy not just constitutional but wise. It does little good to have everyone vote on the issues of the day when no one agrees what those issues are, or they agree on some pleasing lie they told one another on Facebook. On a completely unrelated note, the president-elect took to Twitter last night to take credit for keeping a Ford plant in Kentucky from moving to Mexico. Minor detail: the plant was never closing. Ford planned to move production of the Lincoln MKC to Mexico and produce more Escapes at the Kentucky plant, for a net change of zero jobs. But Trump declared that he “worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky. I owed it to the great State of Kentucky for their confidence in me!” Welcome to the post-truth presidency.