Which Side Are You On

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
-- Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan

Reporters often asked Dylan - or the other performers of the song (AKA the Band) - where Desolation Row is. It's a foolish question, if you consider the lyrics. It's not a slum, it's not a red light district. It's not a whorehouse or a prison. You're taking these things too literal.

Pay attention to the lyrics. You'll realize Desolation Row is the United States.

Not So Much a Flip As It Was a Flop

Why, yes, I did grow up reading Doonesbury:

I do not own rights. the publisher may hunt me down for this...

It's actually a common occurrence. A politician runs on an issue up until the point he/she realizes that position is toxic, and then he/she flip-flops on the issue and hopes to the Old Gods and the New that nobody (heh) notices.

Of course, everyone does. What matters is if A) the media takes it in stride, B) the Establishment leaders take it in stride, and C) the hard-core voting base that still loved the toxic issue won't riot in despair and outrage.

So when Donald Trump decided yesterday to change his tune on mass deportation of "illegal immigrants" there were several ways to view it.

On the one hand, it was kind of expected. That hard rhetoric on deporting 11 million or so illegals - with the clear implication that millions more would be harmed by the effort - was proving to be a deal-killer among the moderate voters that make up the general election cycle (you know, the ones who aren't the rabid Far Right base). Trump was floundering in the polls, making little gains in the chaotic stampede that had been his post-convention "campaign". He needed to regain numbers in the polls and the only way to do that is to start pandering to the Middle.

On the other hand, he did exactly the one thing he kept harping against during the Primaries towards the other Republican candidates, the ones who were professional politicians who made careers flipping and flopping whichever they needed on any particular day. He now had to flip-flop himself, and doing so in a way that made inconsistently bad floppers like Mitt Romney (you could see him twist in the wind over every issue except his massive tax cut) seem like master game-players.

Making it worse is that Trump was signalling a retreat on the single biggest issue he'd been campaigning on since his 2015 announcement: he was giving up a key element of his "Fear The Other" pledge of banning as many non-White people from our borders as best he could. Granted, Trump was still insisting on building that damn Wall of his - apparently he's got a 40-mile-long banner with his name TRUMP(tm) emblazoned on it that needs hanging somewhere - but he was taking off the table a meaty tasty treat that the Alt-White (AKA Angry White Boys) would love to indulge in as a weekend hobby.

In particular, it caught one of Trump's biggest cheerleaders Ann Coulter off-guard, because she just published a rah-rah book about Trump and right on Page 3 she wrote "There's nothing Trump can't do that won't be forgiven... except change his immigration policies."

OOOOOOPPPPSSsss.

And here's the thing. Once Trump and his handlers realize that few - if any - moderate voters are buying Trump's "softer" stance on immigration policy and that they're actually starting to lose whatever wingnut support they still have among the Angry White Boy crowd, they'll just as quickly go back to the "Deport 'Em All" rhetoric that got them here, hoping that it'll at least keep them happy in battleground states like Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri and Texas.

Yeah. Those are battleground states now. That's how badly Trump is starting to lose Red States.

Flop. Trump has always been a Flop.

Every Ann Coulter Mystery Ever Written, Before She Threatens To Write One

So, this is out there:

Ann Coulter: "If Trump doesn't win, it's over. I'll be writing cookbooks and mysteries."

Look, I know as a librarian I shouldn't ban books, but I swear to the Old Gods and the New I ought to be able to maintain some standards, people. I don't wanna shelve those books if they ever see the light of day...

I've got a hard enough time living with myself while my library patrons request these Far Right titles on politics and current affairs. They have a right to read what they want, so that's how I rationalize it, and also why I make sure there's a balance on the shelves with sane moderate or Progressive Left works to at least provide a marketplace of diverse ideas.

But an Ann Coulter cookbook?!?! If the title's To Serve Man someone better sue her.

And if you've ever read Ann Coulter's political stuff - where liberals are evil, conservatives are touched by God, and she is the judge of all Earth - you might get a pretty good idea how an Ann Coulter mystery will read:

It's 1952 in Midvale (it's always 1952 in Midvale). The middle-aged widower sheriff overseeing this delightful small town is rocked by shocking news of a young happily married couple - they had just gotten hitched at the Baptist church just last week! - found murdered one morning. Struggling to make sense of the crime, the sheriff teams up with a thin stunningly beautiful blonde reporter to figure out the clues.

Using her detailed understanding of Randian Objectivism, the pair uncovers the murderer as a doctor of Middle Eastern origin who killed the couple because the wife refused to let him abort her baby. The doctor is also a prominent defender of the FDR-era New Deal, which makes the town's mayor - a weak yet politically ambitious Democrat who wants to prove himself to a stern father (retired war hero general that once saved MacArthur's life in the Philippines) who hopes his son could one day serve as governor - unwilling to press charges because it might start a race riot.

When the doctor threatens the life of the token African-American family in town, the sheriff bravely oversteps his authority, forms a posse with his now-girlfriend reporter, and raids the doctor's home to find a coven of Stalin-worshiping Communists about to kill a honest and unyielding US Senator who served as a tail-gunner during The War. There's a clean shootout where all the bad Commie characters die - the Randian reporter gets to sniper-shoot the lead Commie between the eyes - while the good guys don't even get splinters. The evil doctor is forced to make a public confession where he admits the errors of his baby-killing ways before he hangs himself, the town celebrates with a special election to vote out the craven politician to replace him with a well-meaning television actor, and the sheriff and reporter decide to get married and move to the Big City where the sheriff's Small-Town sensibilities as Police Commish will save that city from collapsing into the moral rot of LBJ's Great Society in the coming decade.  

There. Done. Just change the calendar date (although it will ALWAYS be 1952) and the name of the town, and that will be every Ann Coulter mystery novel ever written before she even writes one.

And the sad thing? Publishers will line up for her mysteries because she has a known name, she has an agent on payroll who will line her up. Even if the official mystery publishers refuse her works, she can easily go to her conservative printing buddies and have them start a mystery series imprint just for her, and make arrangements for bookstores and retailers to shelve her crap at the front door of every Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble out there.

Here's a mystery that's worth solving: can someone figure out why universities and public organizations are still willing to cough up $50,000 in speaking fees for this hack writer Ann Coulter?