Literary Corner: New Republican Poetry

"We are already able to reach the notorious hamburgers of San Diego!" Via  Anita Pitsch, Australian National University Press.

Formal elegance meets wry surrealism in some of the new entries, like this Ionesco-like fantasy by Dr. Gorka, from the CPAC conference:

Joe Stalin's Dream

by Dr. Sebastian Gorka

They want
to take your pickup truck,
they want
to rebuild your home,
they want
to take away your hamburgers.

This is what Stalin dreamt
about but never achieved.

Strictly speaking, I don't believe Comrade Stalin had any interest in rebuilding my home at all. I think he would have relished the uncontrollable overheating, the poor ventilation in spite of gaps exploited by wind and rodent, the ceiling fan in which only one of the four light bulb sockets actually works because of some crazy fault in the wiring. He would have seen it as irrefragable evidence of the collapse of the decadent West, as the contradictions of capitalism become too gross to ignore. I don't have a pickup truck, but I doubt he'd be interested in the occasional hamburger I consume, beyond asserting (no doubt falsely) that Soviet hamburgers are much, much better. Just saying.

Via ellenmellenart.

There's wondrous Zen mystery in this portrait of freshman Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw and his struggle to locate himself on a kind of Republican Platform Nine and Three Quarters:

Dan Crenshaw: The Line Between Sometimes and Never

by John McCormack's Politico Subeditor

The right’s newest
young star in Congress
offers a vision for the party

somewhere between Trumpism
and NeverTrumpism.
But it’s not easy walking
the line in Washington.

And the master is back with a comment on his performance at the Hanoi summit with Chairman Kim Jong-un, where he managed to fail to make any deal but yield his major concession, pulling back in the annual US–South Korea war games, anyway, like a kid who walks out of a birthday party in a rage, missing the cake, but leaving the very expensive present behind him. His attitude seems to be that it wasn't in fact a concession at all, but a negotiating victory for the US, saving us tons of money. Take that, little Rocket Man! 

Why I Decided to Scale Back the Foal Eagle and Key Resolve Exercises in South Korea This Spring

by Donald J. Trump

We spent hundreds of millions of dollars on
those exercises, and I hated to see it.
I was telling the generals, I said: Look, you
know, exercising is fun and it’s nice and they play
the war games. And I’m not saying it’s not necessary, because
at some levels it is, but at other levels it’s not.

This may be a higher level of stupidity than any of us suspected: he's taking the military terms of art, "exercises" and "games", at face value, and no matter how hard the generals work to convince him it's actually a serious matter, he can't comprehend it. He's like, "I've never had any need for exercise, and look at what fantastic shape I'm in!" Well, they're his generals, so they're probably right at some level, but not Trump's level, and that's final.

What do you want to bet this is what Putin told him to do, come to think of it? "These negotiations are at an end, Br'er Rabbit, and by the way, I am totally throwing you into that briar patch!"