The Greatest Show on Earth
A Trump rally in Montana brings out the walking wounded and the Second Coming of William Jennings Bryan
The lean, mean Chicago machine wants to own the inside of your skull
An obsession with politics is a form of mental colonization by people who truly aren’t your friends; it’s un-American, and uncool.
You can smell what’s coming. It isn’t good, what they’re cooking up. It’s been almost a decade now, so we already know the drill: Keep quiet, do what you’re told, don’t think wrong thoughts, and make yourself as small as possible, in the hopes of maybe becoming invisible. This is plainly no recipe for free people to live by, but it’s what seems to be on the menu, today, tomorrow, three months from now, until everywhere in the country feels like the inside of a prison cell in some Latin American country. Dank, damp and dark.
At any rate, that’s the view from beneath the floppy fishing hat that I bought at the outfitting store in Livingston, before I drove out here to Bozeman. Go read Milan Kundera and Czesław Miłosz, the literary giants from the days of Soviet domination of the Eastern Bloc, and tell me that at least half of it doesn’t seem familiar.
America was never this way before. Politics was …
Wisconsin Supper Clubs
Childhood memories may be haunted but the relish tray abides
Pickled mushrooms and asparagus don’t mix well with alcohol; neither does ice cream
The first rule of Supper Club is that they don’t take reservations; the last rule is that no one eats alone
It’s been said that Wisconsin has more ghosts per square mile than any state in America, a claim I can’t substantiate but buy nevertheless. It seems like every town has its own ghost story: haunted hotels, haunted theaters, haunted steakhouses and saloons. Some have seen the apparition of a Christmas-tree delivery ship that sank into Lake Michigan off the shore near Manitowoc in November of 1912, or heard the disembodied sounds of the Kickapoo Polka Band, whose eerie music floats through the Vernon County woods. Others have seen the ghosts of gangsters who laid low in the Northwoods at spots like Manitowish Waters’ Little Bohemia Lodge, where to this day you can enjoy fried lake perch, potatoes, coleslaw, and rye bread in a place whose windows still have bullet holes from the FBI’s botched 1934 raid on the Dillinger Gang.
This was more or less what brought me heading north on Highway 51 towards the vast …
Dream President in All 50 States
Alabama — Bear Bryant
Alaska — Bullwinkle the Moose
Arizona — Barry Goldwater
Arkansas — Bill Clinton
California — Snoop Dogg
Colorado — Adolph Coors
Connecticut — Thurston Howell III
Delaware — Hunter Biden
Florida — Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Georgia — Jimmy Carter
Hawaii — Barack Obama
Idaho — Ernest Hemingway
Illinois — Abraham Lincoln
Indiana — John Cougar Mellencamp
Iowa — Henry Wallace
Kansas — Melissa Etheridge
Kentucky — Diane Sawyer
Louisiana — Huey Long
Maine — George Herbert Walker Bush
Maryland — John Waters
Massachusetts — Ted …
