Patterns of Force

A 100-word story shouldn’t require a 100-word introduction, but here goes…
     Recently, Ron wondered why we’re not writing here more about Trump, and I think a good part of the reason is that it’s simply too hard to keep up. This came to me a week or so after the inauguration when the first batch of Nazi stuff came out, and those stories of an addled president wandering the halls of the White House. With that, I started work on this bit of comedy gold, but by the time I’d finished futzing with it, everyone had already moved on. 
     Enjoy . . .

Remember the one where that “really smart guy” convinced himself the Nazis actually had some good ideas and so introduces them to one faction of a divided and unbalanced planetary system, in an attempt to remodel their world on what he calls the “most efficient society ever created,” except that the thugs who support him end up focussing on the bad Nazi stuff, persecuting outsiders, consolidating their power, and propping up the “stable genius” as a rambling, angry, and perpetually doped-up figurehead.
     Well, it seems those people who missed that episode of Star Trek are now condemned to repeat it.

A time for semantics (part 2)

“Van attack” has a “short sharp shock” metre going for it, but, for assonance, “van rampage” – the name the Toronto Star and Huffington Post are pushing – is hard to beat. And it has a spirit of something more extraordinary, of old made new, beast made man, of erratic movement and duration, of predictable unpredictability.
     “1715, in Scottish, probably from Middle English verb ramp ‘rave, rush wildly about’ (c. 1300), especially of beasts rearing on their hind legs, as if climbing, from Old French ramper (see ramp (n.1), also see rampant).”
     Yeah, on this one, that’s all I got.

A time for semantics (part 1)

Some earlier mass killings-by-vehicle, e.g., “the Berlin Christmas Market attack” or “the London Bridge attack” are named for more specific places. This one, on our “longest street in the world,” makes “Yonge Street van attack” unworkable.
     But is calling this “the Toronto van attack” (CNN, The Guardian, Globe & Mail, National Post) a done deal? How events get their names is the question of Peter Eglin, who traces how a 1989 event initially called terrorism, tragedy, and disaster, became “the Montreal Massacre.” Holocaust, Shoah, Final Solution: names encapsulate our views of cause, effect, rightness, wrongness, extraordinariness, ownership, and appropriate redress.

In a Surreal World

Is Exquisite Corpse dead or merely moribund?
     The Corpse’s last post was made in November, 2016. Since then, Donald Trump has become U.S. President and Ford Nation has returned to life. In the Corpse’s absence, Britain is careening towards Brexit, ice caps are melting, hurricanes and blizzards are rampant, gunmen are rampaging, plastic particles are clogging the sea and our drinking water. By my count there have been five new Marvel Universe films released since the Corpse’s last breath. Can you dismiss any of this as coincidence? What kind of Bizarro World is this? (Disclosure: I’ve always preferred DC myself.)

Cartoon drawn by Jake Tapper of CNN.