There is a Time for Everything, Even No News That’s Fit to Print

Without having read the details and having no intention to do so, I am still wondering if The New York’s Times’ advice for Sunday May 17, about certain six things that will add joy to my day includes links to their other advice about “What can I do about see through white pants?” and “What’s the best way to pack a suitcase?”

Just knowing they are on the case of these significant and most difficult matters reassures me that their wisdom on joy must be deep indeed. I have been informed that they also have a long article in their magazine about an “astounding” discovery that everything in the human body is connected, something, as my father would say, even the village idiot knows but The New York Times just discovered.

As for “The Grey Lady’s” coverage of Trump’s visit to China, where the Chinese have known about the previously mentioned “astounding” medical discovery for only a few thousand years, a wag I know told me they had two reporters assigned to Trump’s special ping-pong negotiator Timothée Chalamet, aka Marty Mauser, to get the inside scoop on his advice to Trump on what kind of outfit to wear during his matches with Xi, and whether orange tights would serve to distract Xi when he was serving. It’s hard to see those tiny balls through the miasma of churning orange legs and the theory seems to be that such tights would counteract the Chinese alleged subtle diplomatic trick of having Trump sit on a lower seat next to Xi to make him seem shorter and more diminished. Trump doesn’t seem to find joy when being short-changed in any way; that’s what makes him great again and again.

Rumor has it that he was not much interested in such tights advice but wanted to be certain Chalamet’s girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, would be table-side to see him serve in his inimitably fierce MAGA style, mouth agape as he screamed USA USA. Jenner demurely told Trump that his soft hands might be a liability in ping pong, to which he is said to have replied, “Yours aren’t. Everybody loves me.” Then he added: “I’m more concerned with what they put in my spring rolls. These Orientals are treacherous.” There are no reports that she replied or grasped his racist non-sequitur, only that she blushed thinking he was referring to her in some way.

I just don’t know what to believe anymore. Current  times were already seeming quite repetitive with news reporting and then when I realized dem N.Y.Times reports on the President’s visit to China seemed the same before he went as when he returned, my head started spinning in circles, which I guess is the way heads spin unless you’re a square.

Just today, one of my sources told me The New York Post reports that the sisters Kendall Jenner and Kylie double dated the misters Thimothée Chalamet and Jacob Alordi, and that the former L.A. detective Mark Furman of the O.J. Simpson trial’s bloody glove fame died. It felt revelatory in some oddly dizzying way, but of what I have no idea since I don’t know who Alordi is and have never been on a double date, but the name Kardashian springs to mind.

But like The New York Times, the Post is a major organ of the corporate media and they also probably know secrets of how to add joy to the days of their readers and what, if anything, to wear under white pants. Wasn’t the O.J. trial in 1995 one those entertaining joys that kept people occupied for months, and then when the Juice was acquitted the nation was divided over whether the orange man was good or evil?

For those Tarot card historians who see oracular meanings in every fallen leaf, one orange man led to another like the second coming or how O.J.’s defense lawyer Robert Kardashian has led inexorably to “The Kardashians” TV series to double dating, ping pong diplomacy, big lips and other body parts.

When Alexander Hamilton founded the Post in 1801 – fifty years before the Times – the country was young and naïve and the wealthy were no doubt in accord with his racism, slaves and all that stuff. And he, or his fans, or someone, got him to Broadway like Jesus Christ, the superstar. Don’t ask “What’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening.” I’ll tell you. Everyone is singing now in the great game of show and tell, like those British soldiers marching to the rat infested muddy trenches of World War I not knowing why the hell they were there: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

Come on – Sing out! Memorial Day is coming round once again. Let’s celebrate war and get riled up to smash those nefarious Iranians and Russians. Everybody loves us. Let us pray!

Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His latest book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press)