Happy Feast of the Assumption, Gentle Readers. It looks to be a beautiful day here on the fabled Isle of Long. I hope for the same for you, wherever you are.

     As the years have passed, I’ve become ever more convinced that the most salient truth of political interplay was spoken offhandedly by a great man who died far too young:

     “Politics is downstream from culture.” – Andrew Breitbart

     It’s part of why I decided to try my hand at fiction. Now, people today have shorter attention spans than our predecessor generations, a topic whose exploration I’ll reserve for another time, so encapsulating important messages in novel-length fiction is less likely to lodge them in a lot of minds than cracking a good joke. The entertainer-pundit who’s proved best at this is Fox News’s own Greg Gutfeld.

     Gutfeld seldom goes on at length. When he speaks for more than a minute or so at a time, it’s usually as a succession of “one-liners.” Consider the following:

     “There’s not a single issue Democrats champion that resonates with the blue-collar American. The only contact they would have with one is hiring a guy to install in the women’s bathroom. And because of DEI the person they hire would be a dwarf amputee who identifies as a carrot. The whole party is a swill of identity extremism, luxury belief, and victimhood. They love open borders because migrants aren’t taking jobs reserved for art history majors. They hate cops because they want to be the ones telling everybody what to do and they still resent the fact that Cagney & Lacey weren’t lesbians. Aren’t we all?
     They also think gender is just an opinion until a man says something they don’t like. Their party leaders are career politicians who’ve never had a real job. Chuck Schumer couldn’t change a tire if you gave him AAA’s phone number and he would only change a light bulb if you held his hairpiece for ransom.

     Cutting, brutal… and undeniably both true and funny.

     Reality is often funny, especially when it’s being denied. It throws up clashes and contradictions that make us double-clutch. We look, shake our heads, look again, and spend a moment disentangling our preconceptions from our perceptions. Often we must struggle a bit to distinguish what we’ve been told to think from what we can see, hear, and smell. If we’re fortunate… and at a reasonably safe distance from “the action”… we can laugh. Laughter, as Reader’s Digest has often told us, is the best medicine.

     That medicine is especially valuable in a nation where twenty percent of the residents appear to be clinically insane and another twenty percent make their livings by pandering to them.

     I could go on about this, but I try to be a good sort, at least on Fridays in the summer. So to close, have a video of Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy Romeo and Juliet being performed entirely by Estonian heavy-construction machines:

     And do have a nice day.