We’ve been thinking a lot about Blazing Saddles lately. We’ve been thinking a lot about it for the past ten years, actually, in different ways at different times.

What first started bringing it to mind, was, well, the obvious: The Sheriff is near. The Sheriff was Barack Obama, and you couldn’t help playing it out from there. (Okay, and Biden is Gene Wilder, and Madeleine Kahn is — maybe we should just keep that one to ourself.)

And if that’s the reason Blazing Saddles came to mind, it should have stopped coming to mind two years ago, with Sheriff Barack and Joe driving off into the sunset in a Secret Service limo.

But it didn’t go away. It keeps coming back.

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We are being told, by people who know much more than we do, not to worry about Friday’s federal-court ruling overturning Obamacare. The judge, a 2007 Bush nominee, was hand-picked for his amenability to the opposition; his ruling contains convoluted reasoning that will surely be overturned by the Fifth Circuit; even the Trump administration is saying it won’t enforce the ruling until appeals are exhausted.

In short, Trust the Process.

We’d like to, but reality jumped that timeline a long time ago. And in this case, there’s a lot that can go haywire.

Because the argument is about the existential nature of something that has no effect.

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If power, as an unindicted war criminal once said, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, there are a lot of Republicans sucking Donald Trump’s cock right now.

And swallowing.

Hard.

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• Malcolm X on the Ten
• Wall Street CEO perp walks
• Smash hiphop musical about Grover Cleveland

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You reach a point in life when you’re Beyond Shock. It’s not merely that you’ve Seen It All Before; you’ve also aggressively Questioned Your Presumptions, so that your foundation in Reality is as solid as it gets, short of swallowing the Red Pill, but that’s metaphysically cheating. Brain In a Vat is a different game.

And yet, despite your best efforts, something happens to upset your mental apple cart. It comes while you’re streaming Fincher’s Zodiac, something you’ve seen before, something you’re half paying attention to, when you catch a throwaway line, a joke about a flamboyant local lawyer who did a guest spot on…

Star Trek?

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