Copyright nhgazette
“Where is my Roy Cohn?” bleated the President in 2018. How times have changed. Now he’s got the best Roy Cohn ever. She’s young and blonde, like a Hitchcock femme fatale, and she’s exacting ruthless retribution as his Attorney General. Still, it feels like something’s missing, though neither Trump nor Bondi seem to have noticed. She’s a General, right? So why is she out of uniform? Perhaps our disappointment stems from reading too many pulp magazines in our youth: stuff like the famous “Man’s Life,” of “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” fame, whose covers often featured lithe, long-legged dolls with whips, wearing a half-unbuttoned black Nazi uniforms, festooned with silver doodads… Sorry, where were we? Oh, dear. It looks like we have fallen into a privilege trap. From the comparative safety of our labyrinthine editorial offices, as entire apartment blocks are being swarmed by armed masked men rappelling from helicopters, we were complaining that our aesthetic criteria are not being met. This just in: we were wrong about that, too. Apparently, some time back, The Big Guy must have bellowed, “Where is my Hugo Boss?” Taking the hint, Border Patrol Oberst-Gruppenführer Greg Bovino, shown at right in a photo commissioned by CNN, clearly clicked his heels and got with the program. It’s a legitimate question: where did he get those drapes? Because it is entirely possible that they came from Hugo Boss AG—the company that made millions of Deutsche marks cranking out millions of SS uniforms with enslaved labor, and is still in business. But wait! There’s more! From 1996 until 2000, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation administered an annual $100,000 Hugo Boss Award. And the world wonders how we get ourselves into these predicaments. Somehow all those Confederate monuments begin to seem a little less strange. Even so, we were shocked—no kidding, we actually were shocked—to learn that on Saturday, a statue honoring Confederate General Albert Pike was erected in Washington, D.C. We cannot do better than (non-voting) Delegate to the U.S. Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton to sum up the general’s military career: “Pike himself served dishonorably. He took up arms against the United States, misappropriated funds, and was ultimately captured and imprisoned by his own troops. He resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime and dishonoring even his own Confederate military service.” No wonder the President ordered that Pike’s statue, pulled down by protestors in 2020, be restored, “to reflect and inspire awe and appreciation for our Nation’s strength, greatness, and heritage.” Were it not for those bone spurs, he, too, might have had such a career. If ever we do get disappeared for materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization—an offense for which we may already be guilty, as evidenced by the photograph on page two of this fortnight’s paper, showing a few thousand of our fellow citizens expressing their displeasure at just about every miserable action take by this Farce Reich since January 20th—at least grant us the dignity of being kidnapped by a moral monster who looks the part. This admittedly irrational concern stems from credible news reports indicating that Bovino’s boss, Fräulein Kristi Noem, Kommandant der Heimatschutzbehörde, is handing out $50,000 bonuses to would-be brownshirts, while waiving age and weight requirements. No wonder so many of them look like rejects from Meal Team Six. Amidst this federal largesse, tens of millions of Americans just got hungrier—even many who work full time. It’s their bad luck to work for corporations that enhance their profits by letting the government assume the responsibility of feeding their employees through SNAP benefits. The President has had no need to ask, “Where is my Albert Speer?” He’s his own Master Builder. He turned Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden into Mar-a-Lardo North. He called in Swedish-made excavators to tear down the East Wing for a huge, gilded ballroom. Coming soon, to stand in front of Arlington National Cemetery, a huge Arc de Trump. Who can fail to see that he means that for his tombstone? Apparently this is what you get when you let so-called Christian Nationalists take over your government. So what’s a disorganized majority to do? Everything it can, surely—including watching out for any internal contradictions that may signal weakness. For example, despite all their in-your-face religiosity, nary a one among these mugs seems to remember Deuteronomy 27:19: “Cursed is the one who perverts the justice due the stranger, the fatherless, and widow. “And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’”
