President Dragon wants more gold
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 4
FARCE AS HISTORY DEP'T.
Terry Pratchett Saw Trump Coming
HERE ARE THE currently open browser tabs next to my main BlueSky tab, in order:
Man who exploded Tesla Cybertruck outside Trump hotel in Las Vegas used generative AI, police say (Associated Press)
Man who exploded Tesla Cybertruck outside Trump hotel in Las Vegas used generative AI, police say (Associated Press) [I clicked it twice by mistake.]
The 48 Democrats Who Voted to Deport Nonviolent Undocumented Offenders (The New Republic)
Mark Zuckerberg's Eternal Apology Tour (New York Magazine)
Judge Cannon Blocks Release of Special Counsel’s Final Report on Trump Documents Investigation (New York Times)
Zuckerberg Wears $900,000 Watch to Announce End of Meta Fact Checks (Bloomberg)
Melania Trump Documentary Scores Massive Amazon Payday (Puck)
I can't read the Puck story because it requires registration and I won't register with Puck on principle, but the subheadline says the licensing fee for the documentary is $40 million, paid from Amazon to the incoming First Lady. It's only Tuesday. It's still 13 days until the second Trump administration actually takes office. I didn't even bother leaving any tabs open about whatever Donald Trump said today about seizing Greenland or seizing Canada or renaming the Gulf of Mexico "the Gulf of America." And I'm getting my updates about the fires sweeping through L.A. on 100 mph wind gusts from Joe, who's watching TV news:
For bedtime, we just finished reading Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! from his Discworld series. I missed the Discworld novels when they first came out; this one was published fairly early among them, in 1989, when I was heading off to college and reading literary fiction, never imagining that the fantasy and sci-fi I thought I'd left behind on the shelves of my childhood bedroom would loop back to dominate 21st century popular culture.
Pratchett's slapstick British satire is not the stuff that somber dragons-and-sex prestige television, or swoony dragons-and-sex romantic-fantasy bestseller franchises, are built on. But Guards! Guards! was prescient in other ways. It's the story of how the threadbare, drunken Night Watch of the city of Ankh-Morpork responds to an attempt to overthrow the government. The scheme is to replace the city's existing corrupt, dictatorial yet pluralistic administrator with an outright monarch by manufacturing a crisis: the Supreme Grand Master of a secret mystical society plots to magically summon a dragon, plague the city with it, and then stage the dragon's defeat at the hands of an assigned hero, who will then by acclamation become a puppet king.
Early on, the Secret Grand Master contemplates his complaining, bumbling underlings:
What a shower, he told himself. A bunch of incompetents no other secret society would touch with a ten-foot Sceptre of Authority. The sort to dislocate their fingers with even the simplest secret handshake.
But incompetents with possibilities, nevertheless. Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He'd take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they'd been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and low-grade paranoia.
This book was published the year Stephen Miller turned 4 years old. Elise Stefanik was 5. Steven Cheung was 7. Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth were 9.
The summoning magic, powered by the rage of embittered mediocrities, works. The crisis unfolds as planned, the government falls—and then the dragon reappears, turns on its summoners, incinerates the would-be king, and seizes the crown itself. At this point, the public, prepared for a coronation anyway, embraces the dragon as its new ruler:
"The way I see it," said one of the revellers, halfway through a huge greasy lump of half-raw meat, "a dragon as a king mightn't be a bad idea. When you think it through, is what I mean."
"It definitely looked very gracious," said the woman to his right, as if testing the idea. "Sort of, well, sleek. Nice and smart. Not scruffy. Takes a bit of a pride in itself." She glared at some of the younger revellers further down the table. "The trouble with people today is they don't take pride in themselves."
"And there's foreign policy of course," said a third, helping himself to a rib. "When you come to think about it."
"What d'you mean?"
"Diplomacy," said the rib-eater, flatly...
"I mean let's say the ambassador from Klatch comes along, you know how arrogant that lot are, suppose he says, we want this, we want that, we want the other thing. Well," he said, beaming at them, "what we say is, shut your face unless you want to go home in a jar."
They tried out this idea for mental fit. It had that certain something.
Here is a clip of a Fox News panelist explaining that demanding to buy Greenland is actually a longstanding American tradition—"Back in 1867, Democratic President Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland"—and that the autonomous territory of the sovereign nation of Denmark, a founding member of NATO, "has a lot of minerals, very important for our country."
As the dragon king settles in, the human official forced to speak for the monarch summons civic leaders to the palace to inform them of their responsibility to bring treasure to their new ruler's hoard, and to discuss with them "the matter of...the king's...diet." ("The age is immaterial. Marital status is, of course, of importance. And social class. Something to do with flavor, I believe.")
They avoided one another's faces, for fear of what they might see mirrored there. Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I'm not as stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard...
But no one said anything. The cowards, each man thought.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, January 6, 2025
★★★★ Pale salt lay scattered on the avenue. The heavy gray morning sky began spilling fine snowflakes ahead of schedule. The snow sifted down with no particular urgency but it quickly caught in the forks of the twigs and coated the cars and the sidewalk. The parka's hood went up for the first time in its career and the flakes, now fluffier, ticked softly against it. The side windows of the cars were flocked. A mail carrier pushed a cart barehanded, with snow gathering on the covers of the mailbags. The snow creaked under the tires of an old Buick Park Avenue rolling up beside an open spot at the curb. The footing was just unsteady enough to bring a little side-to-side toddle to the gait. Individual salt crystals cleared spaces around them in the crosswalks. Sneezing sent a shower of snow chunks flying from the hood. The flakes got even chunkier before they stopped, but the accumulation remained a dusting, not a cleansing blanket.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
FOR DEFECTOR, I wrote about how bleakly mainstream the messages of the Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber seemed to be:
Was this the tone of a mentally ill person? Yes. Was it the tone of the controlling faction of the Republican Party? Also, unquestionably, yes.
Throughout the Trump era, the media and non-Trumpist politicians have been fixated on the idea that there must be some bright line between political beliefs and mental illness, and that you can never blame one for the other. Someone who mails pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and the media, or who chases and tries to strangle a nonwhite person while shouting "This is Trump's America now!" is simply a disturbed individual, not a representative of the larger political situation. When deranged street people started punching Asian American passersby at the height of Trump's holding forth on the "Wuhan flu" and the "Chinnnnna virus," that couldn't have had anything to do with the president. Those people were plain crazy, and Trump was talking about the People's Republic of China, not anyone in America.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from Institution Recipes For Use In Schools, Colleges, Hospitals And Other Institutions, by Emma Smedley, Director of Public School Luncheons, Philadelphia, Pa.; Formerly Instructor in Domestic Science, Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, Pa.; Instructor in Dietetics, The Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses, Baltimore, Md, published in 1919 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Salmon Sandwiches
(50 Sandwiches)
3 one-pound cans salmon
1 pint Boiled Dressing II
6 ounces butter
100 slices bread
Drain, bone and pick salmon apart with a silver fork. Add dressing, mix well and spread on slices of buttered bread.
Calories in recipe 2,219 protein, 9,877 total
Calories in one sandwich: 44 protein, 198 total
Boiled Dressing II
(3 1/2 Quarts)
2 quarts milk
1/2 pound butter
3 cups vinegar
1/3 cup salt
1/4 cup mustard
1/2 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
15 eggs
Heat milk and butter in double boiler. Heat vinegar in a saucepan. Beat the eggs until thoroughly broken, add to the well-mixed dry ingredients; pour over these the hot milk and butter, stirring constantly. Place in double boiler and cook until it thickens, as for Soft Custard Sauce. Remove from the stove, add the heated vinegar, strain, cool and serve.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
.jpg){kind=link}