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 more a form of entertainment than an obsession, but now it’s all these people think …
