American Burlesque
By Paul Edwards
“They got a big theayter what they
call the burleykew, an’ fur fifty cents
yuh can see a dandy show.”
(Oklahoma! pace, Rogers and
Hammerstein.)
February 04, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- “Dandy” is pushing it in this
case, but burlesque it surely has been. The term
comes from the Italian, burla, for joke, which best
describes this boundlessly stupid, futile, dishonest
partisan greased pig chase.
The era when Congress was thought to possess any
collective intelligence or integrity is gone, if
there was one. Twain called it our only native
criminal class, an asylum of idiots, and this
impeachment farce bears him out.
To go to the root of the charade is to experience
grievous embarrassment at the sheer falsity, the
willful dishonesty, the moral vacuity, of the entire
apparatus of our appalling government. By that I
mean not only Congress: the whole dirty, shameless,
corrupted organism.
The House--bagboys for Capitalism, which for decades
has done nothing for the people and routinely
abrogated or violated solemn, specified duties--with
its Democratic majority, brought charges so
specious, vacuous, and exiguous in content that the
contrast between them and the scroll of blatant
crimes Trump has brazenly committed is stunning. The
kicker, the reason for this cowardice, is that
Democrats enabled Trump’s flagrant criminality and
they dare not accuse him of all the perfidy in which
they joined him.
So, a cowardly, deceitful gang of whoring pimps
accuse a base, diseased, ethical toad of behaving as
the creature he is, when their vile complicity with
him to rape and rob the world, eviscerate their own
country, sully and degrade all nature and, with
dazzling imbecilty, alienate the vast community of
nations, is provoking ecological Armaggedon and a
world war with states that can tear this
floundering, lunatic Empire a haemorrhaging new one.
The greatest appeal of traditional burlesque was
slow, lascivious exposure of the nude female body.
In this latter version, both Parties took the stage
without feathers, with their bare faces hanging out.
The only tease that took place was uncertainty
whether those two clowns of bathos, Biden and
Bolton, might have to bare their ugly old-man asses
to a disgusted public.
Now that the goofy, slow motion clogdance is
effectively over, what can be usefully said about
the causes and effects of presentation to the
appalled world of a dunderhead pageant of such
humiliating, degrading inanity?
First, as to causes, our Bull Goose tried to
persuade a foreign head of state to take a shady
action in return for money. Surely no President of
ours had ever done such a thing? Used dollar muscle
on a foreign leader? Please! |