Serious but not literal or maybe that other thing

You know how he gets after a couple of Fox “news” segments:

I’m sure we can count on the impeccable professionalism of the DOJ in this situation. (Like Ash in the original Alien film, Merrick Garland is still collating).

And I realize this has become an extraordinarily banal observation, but the fact that the president of the United States is demanding that the federal government of which he is the chief executive immediately arrest one of his predecessors for utterly imaginary crimes — unlike the current occupant of the office’s countless very very real ones — is not even a news story!

Having spent the last 15 months thinking about pretty much nothing but the bottomless stupidity of this nation, I can’t improve much on this comment from Nick never Nick:

I read once that one time when Black Sabbath was recording an album, they somehow convinced themselves that they were under attack by witches or some other force of darkness. I could totally believe this, because I remember when some of my stoner friends who had been ruined by drugs stronger than pot would fuck around with The Occult, and were legitimately uncertain whether they believed in it or not.

Anyway, as I read about this bullshit in Minnesota, or about how Trump has seized the voting roles and is tweeting about fantastic conspiracies to steal the 2020 election from him, I suddenly thought that I have no trouble at all accepting that he and his henchmen believe all these things, because they are really, really stupid. They are impossible ignorant and just fundamentally dim, and the fact that we let them get into positions where they could do anything beyond being the perpetually dissenting vote on a school board is on us. They’re just fucking dumb, and what they think has no correspondence with how the world works.

Just to lighten the mood, here’s a thing that happened about a dozen years ago now:

It’s a beautiful summer day and I’m in my office, when a 30 something year old guy just shows up at the door and asks if he can talk to me about something. Because I’m an idiot I say sure, and he proceeds to sit down and ask me if I’ve heard of the band Rush. I say yes, and he proceeds to spend the next ten minutes or so laying out how Rush is conspiring against him. I ask how he knows they’re doing this (see idiot, above), and he says all you have to do is read their lyrics very carefully. He pulls out an alarmingly large notebook, and starts referencing it while explaining this part of the theory to me. Using my training as a covert CIA operative, I decide to post a message on the Michigan football board that I wrote a book about, asking the first person who sees this message to call my office phone.

Ten seconds later my friend W from Vancouver calls, and I tell the guy sorry this is urgent I have to take it, but good luck, it really sounds like you have a very interesting story to tell the world.

After he’s gone I give W a 20-second summary of why I asked for a phone call, and the first thing he says is, “Was it Neil Peart?”