Desire for a riotous black comedy that will offend everybody--

Dome with flag photograph
by Robert Linder of Springfield, Missouri

Where is our Evelyn Waugh? Can the current scene drift any closer to black comedy? My fellow Americans (and any non-Americans watching with dropped jaws), this is fabulous comedic, dark-satiric material. We will not be saved by an unexpected knight from the powerful, crazy, possibly terrifying trajectory of the campaign, but we could at least use some vim and vinegar and absurdity-trampling lines from a novelist. And as I have long been a rather jaded and apolitical sort (due to an unfortunate allergy to politicians and an even worse allergy to political language), I prefer that it not be me.

Every blessed week brings fresh absurdities to light, absurdities that ought to ignite some comic genius out there. We need that flamboyant bonfire of words! Take the current instant. Sanders refuses to talk about what socialism has brought to our nearby neighbors in Venezuela, etc.  And when asked why not, what does he say? Because he is running for office, of course! You colossal dummies of the first water, why did you even wonder? Yet, think on this: who would have guessed a politician could be so candid? Meanwhile, the co-anchor of CBS This Morning, Gayle King, tells us that she was at a party on Wednesday, and guess what? Nobody at that party cared one teeny whit about Hilary Clinton's emails! Nobody! Not even those of the Other Party (the Other Party being the opposite of your own adherence, if you have an adherence.) Give Gayle King another lively evening out on the town, and she'll probably cross Benghazi and other troubling little Clintonian peccadillos off the list of voter doubts. Lesson? Go to more parties; frolic; be a Disney girl! Don't worry your little head about the details. In trumpery news, what could be more startling than television "personality" Glen Beck and guest Brad Thor chatting about "a patriot" bumping off the Donald in a hypothetical scenario? And it gets even better when Brad Thor calls Matt Drudge a "despicable lying scumbag" for drawing attention to the "hypothetical I [asked] as a thriller writer." Evidently Drudge was silly enough to take "a hypothetical" as a statement of possibility; imagine that! Personally, I prefer more Shakespearean epithets like churlish, lily-livered hedge-pig or prating pantaloon or mewling moldwarp over "despicable lying scumbag." Nevertheless, I notice with interest and some degree of satisfaction that nothing, nothing, nothing can cross the subject of Trump's strawberry-blond pouf off the national radar. That hair could be a star in the right novel!

Looking back, there's a mighty harvest, waiting, ripe (maybe even just a tad over-ripe?) with wondrous material. And though it's hard to single out any one thing, I just want to give a tiny, eensy-weensy tip of the hat to Carson on the pyramids as really big, big, big granary silos. Adore it! No doubt, dearest reader, you have your own favorite moments. No weak-witted hedge-pig, you! Have we ever had such a bumper crop of good material to draw on? Where, where, where is our novelist who can run riot with this stuff? Who will pluck these reeking canker-blossoms and arrange them into an astonishing, artful bouquet?