• Don Rickles unavailable to ghostwrite insults.
• Wife refuses to rehearse Adoring Gaze for when I’m caught with exotic Eastern European hooker.
• Satanic coven won’t release me from Vows.

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Growing up, we thought our grandparents had witnessed the most amazing era in human history. Sure, we saw the Moon landing on TV, but we were only ten at the time, and while it was certainly cool, we lacked the experience and understanding — and poetry — to put it in a larger context. Our grandparents had seen biplanes, for chrissake. They knew what the Moon meant.

We would have been old enough to hang out at the pinball arcade when we started having thoughts like that. The place was an ad hoc mechanical museum, not because the proprietor had any taste, but because some machines were cheaper to rent than others.

The old ones had their charms, all bells and spinning scorewheels and worn boards. But the lines formed around new shinies like Captain Fantastic, with electronic sounds and digital numbers. Truly that was the future of quarter-enabled entertainment.

Until the night Pong showed up.

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We love third-string Marvel characters, the ones who aren’t big enough for movies or networks, and so end up dwelling in the Netflix basement. We love them because Saving the World has gotten pretty boring at this point in cinematic history — Superman reversed time forty years ago, after all, and after you’ve shown that you can rewind Earth’s spin without throwing everybody into space, you’ve pretty much established that the planet won’t blow up next time.

Besides, Beneath the Planet of the Apes blew up the planet forty-five years ago, so no point going there either.

The Marvel bench lives in the world the first-string saved, satisfying the Gods of Continuity, but their problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in it. That actually makes them more interesting in practice, since their writers have to stretch to make them even worth watching. We have no inherent reason to care about street crime in Hell’s Kitchen. Unless you provide one.

Case in poi—

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J. Edgar Hoover, who was smashing gender norms before it was cool, had his panties in a bunch about Martin Luther King Jr. MLK had a suspicious proclivity to exercise his First Amendment rights, which, if allowed to spread, might undermine the Republic by forcing it to live up to its ideals.

So Hoover did what Americans expect an FBI chief to do: He drove a Ford spied on a United States citizen:

Under the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) King was subjected to various kinds of FBI surveillance that produced alleged evidence of extramarital affairs, though no evidence of Communist influence.

What kinds of surveillance? Well, for starters, how about this:

Hoover deployed agents to find subversive material on King, and Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices in October 1963.

(Readers of a Certain Age may only remember Bobby Kennedy as a Sainted Martyr. But he was also Brother Jack’s attack dog as attorney general, and before that, a rabid anti-Communist working for Joe McCarthy. History is fun!)

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Wait, what? There’s more Sport? We thought Sport came to an end a few weeks ago, when Your Denver Broncos (now Our Denver Broncos, given our recent vertical relocation) won the Super Soaker (or whatever), which was one of those quaint Colorado traditions we thought we could happily ignore until two days later a million fucking people assembled downtown for the express purpose of turning our morning commute into bloody hell.

All the retail high-potency vape pot in the world (or the legally available part of it) won’t make up for that shitstorm.

But since we’re a Socialist Anarchist this year, at least until the convention, political propriety requires us to share the glory and announce our annual Festival of Fail, the Stinque Braquet, hosted again by Braquet Dowager Mellbell, whose beloved Cardinals have already won by refusing to show up.

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Now that America is stuck with him — if America is lucky, only until November — everybody is rushing to explain How He Got Here. There’s King of the Teabaggers, or (our call) Reagan II, or George Wallace 1968, or…

But let’s cut to the chase: Donald Trump has always been with us. If Trump didn’t exist, America would have to invent him. And America tried, most recently with Sarah Palin, but that turned out to be a bad speed-dating session, so America booted up Tinder and kept madly swiping left until the right demagogue caught its fancy.

The position was always waiting to be filled. Trump figured out how to fill it.

And the position, to pick a moment, opened in 1948.

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One day in high school, we had a guest speaker for our Social Studies class. His name was Dean Kennedy, and he was there to tell us about the Mulatto Conspiracy.

And that was his first problem: Nobody in the room knew what a “mulatto” was.

But Dean Kennedy helpfully explained that, and much else, with crude printed charts, and citations from his extensive library of rare books, many of which, he told us, were the only copy that existed.

The presentation finished, and class over, Dean Kennedy left. And then we all spent the rest of the week laughing our asses off.

This was in 1975.

We’ve had many occasions to reflect upon Dean Kennedy and his unique brand of crackpot racism over the years. And every time, it starts with this fundamental point: If Dean Kennedy hadn’t visited, and the class politely listened — and then politely challenged each of his points — we never would have learned about what Dean Kennedy represents, and the kind of person who represents it. Hearing him out inoculated us against the very thing he promoted. It was flat-out absurd, especially to a 15-year-old.

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