December 2020 (ii)keeping up with America’s mayor
I’ve been wanting to get in a few words about Rudy Giuliani, a man whose long decline (America’s mayor falls into vat of radioactive goo; emerges as farting, sweating mascot of national humiliation) has been a great source of joy for me as a sort of slapstick mirror-narrative to the whole tragicomedy of Trump. The guy who was TIME’s Person of the Year in 2001 and received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II now has a podcast called Rudy’s Common Sense where, flanked with iPads, he does infomercials for gold and silver coins (“You buy gold not only for what you know, but you buy gold for what you don’t know”) and warns his audience about home title fraud with a copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sitting on a bookshelf behind him. I’m guessing he hasn’t cracked it open yet, or he might have seen something like this: “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”
ben tapeworm
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