“The imagination is a dying animal,” as the hapless CEO of “Creative Possibilities” told us in a memorable Kids in the Hall skit years ago. That poor submarine-dwelling dreamer was more right than he knew. Look around you, at the people we’re supposed to admire as the leaders of the future. Data-mining fraudster Mark Zuckerberg, who has the physical presence of that Richard Scarry earthworm but none of the charm, stunned the tech world Thursday by announcing a bold new vision: Facebook – on a phone. It was weak tea, but action had to be taken after Zuck’s Tom Sawyer analogue, former Facebook president & N’Sync “cute one” Sean Parker, easily upstaged the social network earlier in the week in the imagination department.

“Facebook Home” is thin gruel in comparison to the terrifying possibilities implied in Parker’s recently mailed wedding invitations – of a medieval-themed gala in which “costumiers” would outfit the guests as elves and hobbits. Parker, a paragon of one-percenter virtue who whined about Occupy Wall Street days before dropping six figures on a Halloween party, angrily set the record straight – this would be no deranged “Game of Thrones” bacchanal in Big Sur, the stillborn creation of a vacuous mind strung out on multi-billion dollar IPOs and undiluted ketamine. No, it is going to be a much more modest and tasteful affair:

“Academy award winning costume designer Ngila Dickson created a series of outfits for everyone that are based on modern suits and dresses with some elements of victorian [sic] flair and whimsy; however they are not at all ‘medieval.’”

Got that, you jackals? VICTORIAN, not medieval – the British Empire declined across many stages. Parker gets these distinctions, in part because of his nauseating efforts to similarly hollow out America until the sun sets on our empire.

Now, if you want my advice – and owing that you’ve stayed the course through the hellscape described above, I imagine you do – Parker should be forced by the State of California to have that “Hobbit”-style union, a real “Morte d’Arthur” affair. Why not? Chivalry is dead in a country that’s belonged to hustling sawn-off creeps like Parker and Zuckerberg ever since we repaid Squanto by giving him a fever. No, the only true innovators we have left are the ones who even on this shellshocked moral plain can still find ways to be even more evil than we remembered possible.

We are seeing this in the Southwest this week, as an unprecedented and remarkably vicious crime spree has claimed the lives of two state prosecutors and a prisons chief. A fellow assistant D.A. was so shaken, he’s quit his case against the prime suspects in the slayings – the Aryan Brotherhood, a homegrown all-American white power mafia so inured to brutality, their members are only comfortable in prison. The only other suspect is, naturally, a disgraced local politician.

White supremacist gangs straight out of “The Road Warrior,” bottomless corporate greed, vigorous celebration of the destruction of the very land we live on into something resembling Dante’s inferno – Parker’s right. We could use a bit of whimsy these days.

General Gandhi

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Guests at my semi-regular literary salon often ask me: “how old are you?” Depending on the questioner, I may laugh, crying mock offense, or coyly purr, “old enough,” or just simply smile, silent, sipping from a jar of my home-brewed sweet schnapps. The fact is, age is no hurdle for enlightenment. At two months or twenty-five years, humanity has remained my mien; its history, my bailiwick.

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” wrote James Joyce one sleepless night, and as I peruse my clippings from the past week in my satellite study, I feel all too sharply the sting of the past’s claim. As I admire George W. Bush’s proficiency in form and space, the works of El Greco and Brueghel flood forth from the memory banks. When President Obama undercuts his own party’s attempts to raise the minimum wage, I see not the tawdry politicking of modern times, but the craftsmanship of a Stradivarius, burning the midnight oil in his violin depot. And when I see that a flock of cardinals have chirped in unanimity for a new pope, I see Julius Caesar, wreathed in laurels, as alive as you or me.

Yes, today is the Ides of March, a portentous day for leaders, and I wonder whether, as Cardinal Bergoglio became Pope Francis, the Argentine saw any assassins in the conclave. A cold snap of Argentinean history swept across all media as a world totally unfamiliar with this unknown quantity tried to pretend otherwise. Had this peace-loving Jesuit been a collaborator with General Videla’s military junta, obscuring the regime’s crimes and dispatching priests to be “disappeared”? Was this economically populist man-of-the-people a political scallywag, cozying up to tyrants and undermining elected leaders ?

Good questions, to be answered by our dogged free press, in all its iterations. And they scotched it – it took a day or so before the claim that the Pope ran a gulag could be rejected. Not a fine example our press set, groping at basic information about God’s earthly arbiter, but then, as in Caesar’s day, when we Americans get our hands on a “tribune of the people,” we tend to also kill him. Just ask now-admitted whistleblower Bradley Manning. Besides whatever demented torture his mouth-breathing jailers come up with, Manning must withstand the smears of the Old Grey Lady himself, neocon BFF Bill Keller. Keller, whose thought experiements in the run-up to the Iraq War consisted of scrawling his byline in wavering crayon above Ahmed Chalabi’s latest howler, has the temerity to mock Manning’s inability to get in touch with a NYT reporter, and crow that Manning would’ve been “on his own” even had the Times heard him out.

With fearless defenders of press freedom like Bill Keller in your corner, who needs assassins? The Fourth Estate again distinguished itself this week, comforting that most afflicted of underdogs: the Fourth Estate. Satanic fluffer and intern fucker Michael Wolff wrote an awful lot of words complaining about how difficult it is for Very Important People like him to have their heads chopped off by a gang of scruffy Jacobins get good tables at expensive restaurants. With any luck, this pike fish of a person will book a dinner date very soon with Patrick Bateman – who is, after all, only marginally less cartoonish than Wolff. Washington’s own Frog Prince, Ezra Klein, extolled the praises of high-flying, often anonymous journalistic sources – sources who’d certainly never manipulate a shrewd operator like Ezra into printing puffery and lies. And, ahead of Obama’s upcoming visit to Israel, sober, “thought-provoking” glossies, like New Republic and The Economist – the kind of magazines poseurs read to feel smart – proved their intellectual bona fides by descending into sub-South African levels of ethnic chauvinism and unblinking racism.

No matter, it’ll still be their world – no matter how far afield the fuckers gallivant. Chicago’s unionbuster-in-chief and destroyer of public schools, hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, moves to a new ministry in Washington. Obama heads to Israel, to laud a U.S.-funded missile defense system that does not work, and to pretend he is not hated there. Short-selling market fraudster John Paulson mulls a move to Puerto Rico, like any good patriotic American dodging capital gains taxes . Life contracts, thinned out by a thousand cuts, while the rest of us get a little hungrier and confused.

On second thought, maybe Brutus had the right idea. Think that over as you fall asleep this Ides of March.

General Gandhi

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When I learn of a high-profile quarrel within the heavily subsidized loss leader we call “the free press,” my response is the same when as when I hear, late at night and half-asleep, one of my eleven cats coughing up vomit somewhere nearby: alarm, then, gritting my teeth, anger, then disappointment. Eventually the awful braying ends, I get out of my U.S.M.C. surplus cot, I mop up the effluvium with a rag, I withdraw.

I once had dreams of homesteading the Fourth Estate, a mangy dingo groomed and retrained to be a watchdog. Now, those aspirations seem like a child’s fantasy, in a world jobbed exclusively by highborn clods like David G. Bradley, publisher of the elaborate money-and-influence laundering front known as “The Atlantic.” This week, freelance writer Nate Thayer published an email exchange with “Atlantic” Global Editor Olga Khazan, revealing that though they’d love to republish one of his articles on their website, they would not be able to pay him for his work – in Khazan’s words, she was “out of freelance money right now.”

The well had run dry. In Loretta Lynn’s words, there was nary a “poor man’s dollar.” Only the essentials could be budgeted, like a pair of ponies for apartheid jailer/“journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg. But what this august publication could not offer Thayer in money, they could in exposure – as Khazan put it, “we do reach 13 million readers a month.” This is an increasingly popular business model, advanced perhaps most successfully by the Bride of Dracula, and heartily defended by titans of journalism like Jonathan “Ernest Goes to Iraq” Chait, and Matt “Human Ziggy” Yglesias.

Such journalistic ethics lead to conclusions rooted in natural law: with a scrum of writers, it’s the company store that dictates the price. And prices aren’t just monetary. It’s all rather unseemly, but as nature abhors a vacuum, nature will fill the vacuum – albeit, usually, with the most low-down, egg-sucking elements. Bill Keller whines about Twitter bullies. The aforementioned Dauphin of Dreck, Jeffy Goldberg, praises guns, and their ability to neutralize anything from home intruders to Connecticut kindergartners. After mocking pro-democracy activist in Iran face-to-face while they were being tortured and killed, Jon Stewart announces he’s directing a paean to pro-democracy activists in Iran, to predictable plaudits.

Thus, the system works – an army of writers are ranged against society, a great winnowing occurs, and we are left with the crème de la merde. And this elite serves the public well, chopping down any poppy that grows too tall. Any freak that emerges from the cloaca too wormy and misshapen will be duly scorned and snubbed by the well-formed droppings. Just ask White House hopeful Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) Paul, a neo-segregationist mutant of genetic proportions, made the mistake of filibustering Obama’s nominee to the post of High Executioner, John Brennan, for the minor crime of being unable to answer whether it was okay to assassinate Americans without due process.

Yes, Sen. Paul was right, for maybe the first time in his life – and he was predictably torn up by a two-party dervish. Who says there’s no such thing as bipartisanship in Washington, where Obama courts John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Paul Ryan like they’re an unattainable pixie girl working at a reaaaaally cool vintage clothing store? Any freak that shows the weird flash of bell-curve decency that only the truly fucked know – they will be destroyed. Just look at the warm obituaries offered in the West to the late Hugo Chavez, sometimes reprehensible, sometimes not – but primarily despised here for what he said about the West, rather than what he did. We are served well by a system, so stocked with antibodies against such virulent strains of discourse.

The deck reshuffles, new cards are dealt, we get drunker. It is a strange paradise where the incipient threat of a nuclear attack by North Korea can be the only thing warming the hearts of Americans these days, but then, the Chicago Bulls are long experienced at heaving such thunderbolts.

I once had a memorable Fourth of July. I was splayed over the railing of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the dark Potomac below me and the lights of Georgetown beyond me. I was twisted on applejack, fermented for four months in an empty jug of Juicy Juice I’d concealed in grandma’s deep freezer. In colonial times, your Sam Adams or Paul Revere would’ve stashed a couple of growlers of the stuff in the snow, and now here I was, drinking it all in the summertime. And whether it was that potent rotgut, or the plain truth, the moment the fireworks flew (which I couldn’t stand to look at), I saw a column of rats scramble across the girder below me like it was greased.

General Gandhi

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The noose is tightening. Like that “Twilight Zone” with William Shatner, I see the goblin on the wing of my airplane, but my shrieks are scorned, my alarums mistaken for the ravings of a drunken lunatic. Well. For four weeks running I have warned you, loyal reader, of the abominable power Web 3.0 strongman Chris Hughes has acquired after winning The New Republic at Marty Peretz’s weekly cockfight. And now – not coincidentally – those chickens have come home to roost.

Facebook – the scheme from which Hughes extracted his obscene wealth – tried to censor my insights.

Oh, sure, their well-oiled PR machine spat back sundry defamations from their Palo Alto ivory tower call center – “what,” “I don’t understand you,” “you are slurring your words an awful lot” – but as far as I’m concerned, I can draw a solid, yellow line between Hughes/The New Republic and the rejection of my lucid, eloquent social criticism as too “vulgar” for social networkers. Facebook is a repulsive company, to be sure – COO Sheryl Sandberg is currently hard at work redefining “feminism” as “bilking pension funds during an initial public offering.” But as a fearless truth-teller, I must look past my own tribulations. Unfortunately, this is not a case of a few bad apples; the whole American barrel has rotted in winter’s cellar.

My amusing web-knifing came after a week of far more serious censorship, the kind that should be heartily enforced against bad people, cutting against the grain of America’s sturdy support beams. Just ask the fine minds at the Onion. These remorseless swine they call “comedy writers” or “satirists” set out to profane the Oscars – a sacred night. See, after a soirée of cross-gender bridge-building, amidst an atmosphere of women-friendly entertainment reportage, the Onion decided to call nine year-old nominee Quvenzhané Wallis a “cunt.”

Or something. Satire is one thing – but using the language of vicious gossip rags as the vehicle for satire of said vicious gossip is quite another. There was thankfully much opprobrium, from serious news aggregators who would never be caught trafficking in exploitative celebu-porn, and the Onion was forced into a humiliating climbdown. A victory for any right-minded American, as the Onion had brutally suborned young Quvenzhané into the flesh racket of the Hollywood starlet. It is still a good six years before such a move would be fathomable.

Buzzfeed, one of the chivalrous, substantive news sites that so vociferously condemned the Onion, likewise reported on another “truth-loving” rogue desperately in need of a correction. Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat was nominated this year for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, for his wrenching documentary “Five Broken Cameras.” The film, named for the five cameras Burnat saw smashed, shot and burned by Israeli soldiers and settlers over the course of filming, documents the superhuman struggles of Palestinian villagers in the West Bank flashpoint of Bil’in. And naturally, as is America’s wont, we welcomed Mr. Burnat to LAX as we would any Palestinian: with suspicion, particularly that he could have really been nominated for an Oscar.

Thank God Buzzfeed could serve as a watchdog in such a disturbing case of racial profiling – by suggesting that Burnat had staged the incident as a “publicity stunt,” that he had exaggerated the length of his family’s detention, and that he had been unable to produce his tickets to the Oscars. As proof, Buzzfeed cited “sources” at the airport – a dainty fib, which they later corrected to clarify that one anonymous customs official had been the leak. Oh, and Burnat couldn’t have shown his Oscars tickets, because it was two days before nominees received them. Burnat was eventually released, and incomprehensibly stated, “although this was an unpleasant experience, this is a daily occurrence for Palestinians, every single day, throughout the West Bank.” Whatever, man. Let me know when you produce some quality Will Ferrell reaction gifs.

Yes, it seems like the right people are finally being silenced. The days grow longer as we enter March, less slush to wade through than the day before. The back-stabbers who’d sell us out to ecumenists and peaceniks are being eradicated, unable to breathe the air generously granted to them. I thank God each morning and each evening that literal James Bond villain and destroyer of worlds Bradley Manning is in the brig, and that prior to his destruction of the right for U.S. airmen to quietly incinerate journalists and good Samaritans, he was duly snubbed by both the Washington Post and New York Times. We are the first advanced society on Earth to choose the greatest truth: that we do not want the truth. What fools these mortals be!

General Gandhi

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I sleep fitfully these days, pained, as I am, by the twin buffets of ignorance and caprice so commonly constitutive of my many foes. If measured against the yardstick of an old aphorism - that a truly enterprising muckraker’s funeral should draw no more than two mourners - then I am well on my way to the depths of greatness. But if ignominy and revilement are to be my bailiwick – my promising military career ended on dark terms in Kosovo – then I must publicize those palpable hits I do inflict. As I wrote in this column three weeks ago, the rebadged, “Lean Forward”-era New Republic, as edited by start-up lottery winner Chris Hughes, has sought to mark itself as a “muckraking dynamo,” a “Washington magazine that would do nitty-gritty long-form journalism.” Ergo: after commissioning from Steven Brill a highly praised and heavily sourced twenty-four thousand word inaugural cover story on usurious healthcare costs, TNR ignominiously killed the hard-hitting exposé. And for what? Soft-focus canoodling with the Drone King himself.

Quelle surprise! Sometimes my powers of cognition frighten even myself. Brill, who then sold the story to Time, has taken to calling Hughes a “liar,” even demeaning the twenty-nine year-old as a “drunk” running roughshod over the college paper. In the mannered world of print journalism, where freelancers would sooner eat a discarded hypodermic than piss off an editor, this is the equivalent of taking a shit on a first-class dessert service (Related: would TNR be interested in a feature on that burgeoning trend? I should be able to bust it out to their standards on my lunch break). Yes, these are timorous times for journalists, so pusillanimous in standing up to the powers-that-be; somebody really must reward them for their periodic efforts serving the public.

Just ask Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), or as I like to call him, “The Bad Congressman.” Junior just pled guilty in federal court to spending seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in campaign funds on elk heads, Build-A-Bears, and Michael Jackson’s discarded fedoras – despicable crimes, and rightly damned as such by the fourth estate. It takes courage to dress down an incontrovertibly guilty black politician in America, especially when their behavior despoils the largely sterling reputation of our more respectable legislators. I say, bully! The cancer has been excised from the rotten bowels of the Republic, scraped out. The sickness is contained.

Yes, with the wicked Jackson the Younger dispatched to a jail cell, the Beltway circuit has returned to its placid state as the home of America's finest citizens. Like the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake. Lake, who holds the unique distinction of being both the walrus and the egg man, knows the way of the world, as only a hard-bitten lamplighter could. See, Eli is, like, totally copacetic with the revelation that broad swathes of the Israeli Defense Forces are sociopathic lowlifes Instagram-ing war crimes: in the Bard of Avon’s words, the IDF “works hard and plays hard.” Do you mistrust the ability of this paragon of journalistic integrity to lead the public astray? After all, what tales could be told out of school by a truth lover who defended Iraqi “aluminum tubes” soothsayer Khidir Hamza as “an example of a defector who definitely got it right," shortly before the Iraqi hero was fired by Paul Bremer?

These wintry months have been some of the proudest for watchdog journalists since the Scopes Monkey verdict was announced. Vietnamese orphanage blade runner Chuck Hagel was irrefutably exposed as a “ Friend of Hamas.” Peerless pressman David Gregory was rehired as America’s “grand inquisitor,” for another few years of subhuman dance and on-air gun crime. Soledad O’Brien, that mean CNN lady known for asking all those harsh questions far too acrid for my delicate disposition, has been relegated to the b-side.

Yet it is a glorious time to be an American. Just look at our national playground, Las Vegas, where one minute you could be beating the house, and the next, shotgunned from your Maserati into a tank of potable water! Even the depredations of sin are cartoonish and fun!

General Gandhi

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