When buying for our very special President, it’s important to pay attention to the little hints that he drops. The lingering look at larger European ballrooms, the admiring comments about other countries’ triumphal arches, the discreet relief letters added to a national performing arts center…but we should try to surprise him, because we really love him. Right? Sure we do.

But we have to do it quickly, because the gifts are flowing in. Since you started reading this, the State Department has already renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after him and the National Parks Service announced free admission to U.S. citizens on his birthday. So get gifting!

In Rome, the manhole covers say “SPQR.” “DJT” is one letter cheaper, which means we can have ours gilded, too. And how about street names that commemorate his family members: Melania Street NE, Tiffany Street NE, the Ivanka Memorial Circle.

If D.C. wants statehood so badly, let’s make them a protectorate under the President’s direct personal control. Call it “Trumponia.” We’ll tell him—not even lying—“This is 400 times bigger than what the Pope has.” That’ll really make the great man smile.

And why stop at the border? NATO would be a lot more high energy if it stood for “National Auxiliaries of the Trump Organization.” That’s just great branding.

Those of you with really deep pockets, consider something in space. An artificial satellite is really the least you could do. If you really wanted to go “all out,” you could use a bunch of perfectly positioned nukes to carve Trump’s portrait bust out of the Moon.

I’m not saying it would be easy. I am saying, you could probably make it back in tax breaks.

The present ideas are really endless. Even the poorest citizen should show his fealty with a simple name change. “Stephen N. Pokorny” improves into “Donald J. Trump MMMMMMMMMDCCCLXXXVIII” Social Security can do this for free. It’s like they’re expecting us to do it.

So that’s for eighty. What do we do for 81? Most English words are stupid, and would be improved by a change to “Trump.” God (and Trump) willing, this time next year, we’ll speak as one people: “Trumpy Trumpday, Presitrump Trump!”

MARTIN SKLADANY is a professor at Penn State University,

Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME]: “I am a woman.”

Sen. Dick Durbin [D-IL]: “In addition to the video of you at the Olympics, shaking up a bottle of beer and placing the spout in close proximity to the goalie’s, er, hindward opening—”

MG: [Long belch into mic, then] “Prove it.”

Sen. Durbin: “Mr. Gerber, you just showed it to Sen. Murkowski. You just walked over here and when I leaned over to look you said, ‘No, only for cool kids,’ then showed her your phone and said, ‘Wanna party after?’”

MG: “Senator, there’s only one party we should be complaining about, and it’s the lying, cheating, Democratic—”

Durbin [to Chair]: “Madame Chairwoman, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d like to enter the video titled ‘BUD-ENEMA!!!1’ shot by TikTok user @daddylovesfeet420 into the Congressional Record.”

• • •

Sen. Patty Murray [D-WA]: Not just one, but several sources, Mr. Gerber, have alleged episodes of excessive drinking—”

[As the Senator speaks, MG puts chin in hand theatrically, missing several times. On the third attempt, he falls out of his chair completely, causing aides to help him up.]

MG: “I’M FINE!”

Sen. Murray: “—unexplained absences, totally unreasonable delays between issues, and behavior that concerned former and current subscribers to your publication, The American Bystander.”

MG: “Who said that? I’ll kill them!”

Sen. Murray: “So we can assume you’re administering polygraphs to —”

MG: “The only thing you can assume, Patricia, that I’m going to put my foot in someone’s ass!”

Sen. Murray: “Please don’t call me that.”

MG: “Well, stop calling me ‘Crazy Eyes,’ then! I have [searches for word]…astigmication.”

• • •

Sen. Chris Coons [D-DE]: “It is true, as has been reported in The Atlantic and other places, that you give friends gifts of expensive bourbon in engraved bottles?”

MG: “INCOMING! [hurls bottle at Senator] You’re welcome.”

Sen. Coons [straightening back up]: “Mr. Gerber, that smells like a cheap blend.”

MG: Well, we’re not friends.”

• • •

MG: “I don’t know where you get off saying, ‘I read and write at approximately a fourth-grade level.’”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen [D-MD]: “I’m not saying it, I’m quoting—”

MG: “You are saying it! That’s what it means to move your lips while you force air out of your mouth!”

Sen. Van Houten: “Mr. Gerber, I am quoting your own magazine.”

MG: “Well, consider the source.”

• • •

MG: “The only person in this room, Senator, who has an embarrassing, astronomical, unpaid printer’s bill is you, from the Austin Peay Law Review in 1982, which—”

Senator Martin Heinrich [D-NM]: “That’s not, we’re not—”

MG: “A printer’s bill during your tenure which, adjusted for inflation—”

Sen. Durbin: “Mr. Gerber. Please get off the table. Mr. Gerber, I did not go to Austin Peay—”

MG: “6.2 million dollars, that what you owe, Senator. Until you pay that—”

Sen. Heinrich: “I say again, I did not attend Austin Peay Law School. I worked as an engineer—”

MG: Tell that to the printer, Senator. Tell that to the printer’s children.”

• • •

Sen. Mitch McConnell [R-KY]: “How do you feel about cats, Mr. Gerber?”

MG: “I like ‘em. Scratch that, I love ‘em.

McConnell [chuckling]: “‘Scratch that.’ Good one.”

MG: That’s nothing, Senator. Wordplay is my game. And we take it deadly seriously. The Chinese understand that. The Fentanyls. As long as I’ve been at The American Bystander, we’ve been pro-cat.”

Sen. McConnell: “Boys or girls? Boys are supposed to be more affectionate.”

MG: “Senator, as you’ll see in the handout” [MG brandishes a page] “I have provided ten photos of the best boys in the world, taken right off the website of the Rock Creek Park Animal Shelter. That number of adoptable cuties represents an increase of infinity since the last time I testified.”

McConnell: [almost cooing] Which was never.

MG: So the math works out. Whew.

• • •

Senator Jon Ossoff [D-GA]: “…which is why I must express grave concern, the deepest concern, over your editorial judgment, Mr. Gerber. Potential contributors—these are people who’ve already written for the magazine, mind you, New Yorker people—they say that your response time for emails is, and I’m quoting here, ‘Sometime between ‘I honestly think Mike might be a fictional character’ and ‘Never.’”

MG: “INCOMING!” ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of Cloakroom Chatter, the only official print humor magazine of the United States Senate, and also The American Bystander.

OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, how excellent they are. If they didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.

When I was 22, and it came time to choose my career—on this side, historian of The Sixties and assorted American weirdness; on the other, comedy writer—I picked the latter almost solely because it would give me more human contact.

Little did I realize what life had in store!

Back then, comedy writing was a distinctly in-person affair, as it had been for decades. Whether the final product was words on paper or sketches on TV, a job cracking jokes with pastrami-breath (sandwiches sent up from the deli downstairs) seemed like Heaven to me. It still does.

By the time I was 25, however, I was too sick to work outside the home; all my jokes for SNL, for example, were sent in via fax, and whenever I felt well enough to attend Dress on Saturday night, I had to be no more than twenty steps from a bathroom. “Excuse me, famous producer who could make my career, I am suddenly chalk-white and sweating for reasons I cannot go into right now. It was certainly not your joke about Monica Lewinsky, which I found both fresh and insightful. Please step aside, I must sprint.”

Yes, it was awful. And yes, it’s better now…though at the moment I seem to have eaten a Food of Death. Trader Joe’s oatmeal, what could possibly be in that? “Why is this making me sick” is the world’s most boring game, and I hope you play it as infrequently as possible.

Anyhoo, by the time I started publishing The American Bystander in 2015, my hope was that we’d soon grow big enough to have cozy offices here in Santa Monica, where local contributors could swing by for “editorial conferences”—time-honored publishing-speak for “a stiff drink and some laughs.”

A magazine without a tavern runs at half-power. According to dear-departed pals Brian McConnachie and Sean Kelly, much of the magic of the early National Lampoon was generated after-hours at a place they memoralized as “Brew ‘n’ Spew.’ Not PUNCH’s Mahogany Tree, but as close as you got in New York in the Seventies.

Perhaps someday I will be commandeering a table inside Ye Olde King’s Head; but until then, all paid Patreon subscribers can join Laura and I (and special guests?) every Friday at 3 p.m. EST. Sometimes we’ll have something planned—I just talked to a world-famous type designer about coming in and saying a few words—and sometimes, we’ll just freeball it. If that sounds like fun to you, go over to the Patreon and sign up. Worth $5 a month.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to sprint.◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander, an all-star quarterly humor magazine with a truly awesome old-fashioned nameplate.

It’s only human to want your own Air Force. “Bomber Harris, today’s target is the Von’s on Wilshire. Cashier 3’s rudeness is unforgivable.” When I get depressed, I lose all sense of proportionality. And the cost of plane fuel.

When my mood turns Churchillian, the only thing for it is Churchill’s own remedy: strong Cuban cigars.

I am not in the great man’s league: Sir Winston reputedly smoked ten a day. The big ones. The ones we now call “Churchills.” That is what the hippies used to call an heroic dose. My depression is not that severe; I light up only when absolutely necessary, once every six weeks or so. This is salutary not only to my oral health, but also my budget. Good cigars ain’t cheap.

But here’s the thing: they must be Cubans, or they don’t really work. Non-Cubans—called “New World cigars” in the business—are a perfectly pleasant experience. They’ll even give me a buzz; less than one cigar a month keeps my tolerance low. I’ll be sitting on my balcony and suddenly the palm trees will begin to swim, and the Man in the Moon will wink at me.

The next morning, however? 100% of the bad breath, none of the emotional lift. Whether I pay $10 or $100, a Dominican or Honduran or Nicaraguan cigar is fine. But Cubans seem to be medicine, and I think that’s why Churchill smoked them. Churchill smoked Cubans like it was his job, because the smell of burning tobacco was the only thing that ran off his “black dog.” And, it seems, mine as well.

• • •

To be clear: I’m not sharing this in the spirit of “one weird trick.” And as my country continues to starve and torture the island of Cuba in the cruelest way, for reasons no one seems to be able to articulate, I’m a bit embarrassed to even bring it up.

It cuts against the grain of modern life—and certainly Southern California—to assign any positive impacts to smoking, so the reactions of people around me when I share The Cuban Effect range from skepticism to outright hostility.

“Have you tried therapy?” Yes. “Meditation?” Do it regularly. “Yoga?” Yes—have you tried qigong? “Exercise?” I bike 30+ miles a week.

None of these, not one, not even all of them together, lift my mood like one single Bolivar Royal Corona. And it lasts for weeks.

• • •

I’m always asking other cigar smokers if they’ve had this experience—if you have, let me know in the comments. My nervous system is strange indeed, and for most of my life, my medical struggles have been mine alone. A little company here would be comfort.

Whenever I’m in a cigar store and the counterman has that lined, slightly shiny sunburned look of the lifelong smoker, I ask him. “When you smoke Cubans, do you get an extra lift? I find it helps with my depression.” While all of them speak of the distinctive flavor of Cubans—it’s called “the Cuban twang”—most of them think I’m undercover Treasury, looking to bust them. I am not, I try to say with my body language. I speak with such sincerity and fellowship that it hurts. Most brush me off, or get pissed that I’m asking about the one kind of cigar that don’t have.

But once, a guy gave me an answer—and maybe it’s malarkey, or maybe it’s the key to everything.

Last October, I was visiting my General Manager Laura Fox in Amish Country. You might not know this—I didn’t—but Pennsylvania is a big tobacco-producing state, which means there are no taxes on tobacco. And that means there are as many cigar stores there as there are taco stands in SoCal. So Laura does nothing but ferry me to this one and that one, and then shift from foot-to-foot feigning interest as I patiently delve into arcana. “…quite apart from the tobaccos, a corona or robusto vitola (size) will taste different from a torpedo. Same blend, different vitolas, different flavor.”

(Yes, I should pay her more. Much more.)

Anyway, on that day last fall, when I got to the counter, Jimmy (not his real name) looked over what I’d selected. He made an approving noise—this doesn’t always happen—and singled out a dark black stick for praise. “These Murcielagos are strong.”

“I like ‘em,” I said. “Plus there’s a bat on it, for Halloween.”

“What’s your favorite smoke?”

“Cubans,” I said, opening my countenance to near Santa Claus-like friendliness. “Cohibas if I win the lottery. Montecristos when I’m with my Dad, ‘cause those are the ones he likes. But bury me in Bolivars.”

“You do like the strong stuff.”

“Hey, can I ask you, do you get a special kind of euphoria with Cubans? For me, they’re better than Prozac.”

He laughed and said, “I know why that is. When a plant grows, all the minerals and other nutrients are drawn up and concentrated in the leaves. In Cuba, there’s a lot of lithium in the soil. Sos Cuban cigars, some of ‘em are like natural antidepressants.”

• • •

Now, Jimmy is not a doctor, and neither am I. But no one is more dedicated to their research, sos the hunt for knowledge will continue…at least as long as my supply holds out. I’m currently stockpiling, in case Cuba’s ongoing cataclysm closes my natural pharmacy.

To any cigar smokers in the audience: is this your experience as well? What do you think of the lithium theory? Have you heard any other reason?

It’s not a healthy habit, I know. But at least it’s better than sending Spitfires to strafe the grocery store. ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander, a humor magazine “with hints of leather, dark chocolate, and anise, especially during the last third.”

Since 2008, I’ve run a Beatles blog named Heydullblog.com. Reasonably well thought of in Beatle circles, the site was named by my friend and fellow Fab obsessive Ed Park, who is on Substack but not linking for some reason. Anyway, this afternoon a commenter there asked me to opine on the troubles of famed Beatles writer Mark Lewisohn, who is currently writing the middle volume of his magnum opus on the band. Lots of fans are worried that the final two books will never appear, because Mr. Lewisohn is famously meticulous, and Volumes II and III have no publisher. The following is my completely unsolicited analysis of the situation.

Anyway, enjoy.—MG.)

I had not been following the publishing trials and travails of the world’s foremost Beatle researcher, Mark Lewisohn (having plenty of publishing trials and travails of my own), so I was surprised to hear from commenter @Craig that he doesn’t have a publisher for Volumes II or III of his definitive Beatles history. Volume I, <em>Tune In</em>, came out in 2013 to much acclaim, and so much fan interest that a truly mammoth 1728pp Extended Edition is available right now for $169.00 on Amazon.com. (It had gone out of print in the States, which caused us to <a href=”https://www.heydullblog.com/books/lewisohn-tune-extended-edition-longer-available-us/”>opine about it then</a>.)

To paraphrase @Craig, he asked, “What’s the hold up on Volume II? Is it Lewisohn’s meticulousness, or the immense sea of data he must swim through, or some arcane publishing problem? O book publishing guy, enlighten me.”

In responding to @Craig I found myself typing out a fairly detailed publishing plan, so I thought I’d break that out into its own post. I--along with most of you!--desperately want Mr. Lewisohn to finish his series, not just because I want to read it, but because I believe it will be the rock upon which all future Beatles churches will be built upon.

For those Dull-readers who don’t know, I worked in magazine publishing in the 1990s, and then in the 2000s wrote and self-published a series of parodies of <em>Harry Potter</em> that exploded all around the world. My books have sold over 1.25 million copies in 25 languages, so I have negotiated and read a few big-number, worldwide contracts of the Lewisohn-writes-about-The-Beatles scale. (BTW, I’m in the process of writing another <em>Barry Trotter</em> book, encompassing all that’s happened in the wizarding world since 2003. I’m having fun.) Nowdays, I edit and publish <a href=”http://www.americanbystander.org” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>The American Bystander</a>, a more-or-less quarterly all-star print humor mag. <em>Bystander</em> was funded via Kickstarter in 2015 and over the last 20 years or so, I’ve raised probably north of $500,000 using crowdfunding platforms.

So I have a lot of relevant experience here; still, I could be full of shit. The following is offered simply in a spirit of thanks and helpfulness to an author whose work I admire.

I was shocked by the one-book deal; surely people who know lots more than I do negotiated this deal, but doing it in pieces strikes me as a heck of a gamble. Each future book would have to be negotiated from scratch, and would rest on the scale of success of the one(s) before it. And since there are multiple publishers for Volume I, there’s just a hell of a lot of moving pieces, any of which could torpedo future deals. Editors come and go, publishing houses get sold, and books tank for lots of reasons -- it’s all about timing -- and so if I’d been asked, I would’ve said, “One publisher, all three books, big number.”

From the outside, it seems Volume I did well, but I guess not well enough for any of the various publishers (Crown/RH in the US; Little, Brown/Hachette in the UK, others surely) to lock up the rights to the sequels. To be clear, if <em>Tune In</em> had been an <em>Anthology</em>-like smash, someone already with an interest would’ve scrambled to lock up the other two books. Now, since it has only sold <em>well</em>, you’re in a no-man’s-land. Anyone who owns Volume I has a functional “right of first refusal” for Volumes II and III; no new publisher is going to like being partnered to the publisher of Volume I, and so they will try to buy those rights cheaply, and if they can’t, they’ll probably just pull out. Then will you be forced to take whatever the Volume I publisher wants to give you. It’s all sticky.

What I’d assumed--and what I would’ve instructed my agent to go for--was a large lump sum payable over time, for worldwide rights for all three. This would allow for the buyer to reduce their exposure by being able to sublicense books (and audio) in foreign markets, while also securing my research and living expenses for the decade(s) needed. Say, $2.4 million for worldwide rights to all three books, paid out $120,000 annually for 20 years, with lump sums accelerated upon delivery of MS. An arrangement like this would secure Lewisohn’s time, incentivize early completion, and would not be a horrendous risk for the publisher. Publisher risk would also be reduced by the pace of inflation ($120,000 ten years from now is worth less).

But here we are, with Volume I published by various outfits, and Volume II taking longer, and Volume III--perhaps the most difficult one of all--yet to be started. Mr. Lewisohn is <a href=”https://www.marklewisohn.net/events/evolver-62-2022/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>doing stage shows</a> to support himself as he researches, and he’s on the outs with Apple (<a href=”

target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>backstory here</a>?). Given this situation, here’s my suggestions, worth what anybody paid for it.

Mark Lewisohn is in an excellent position...regardless of what publishers will tell him. They will tell him that the main buyers for this book (Boomers) are dying, and that subsequent generations are less interested in The Beatles, and less interested in books, and more difficult to market to efficiently, and so forth. They will tell him that the first book in a series is always the most impactful. They will question his vitality and ability to finish the project. They will force him to take out life insurance for the amount of the contract. They will say <em>anything</em> they think will get that advance number down.

But Mark Lewisohn is the preeminent scholar of a pop cultural phenomenon with fans in the tens of, or even hundreds of, millions. There is no guarantee that readers in twenty years will be reading Harry Potter (especially since JKR’s public persona seems to be actively antagonistic to so many fans); biggies like Stephen King or James Patterson face an even more uncertain future. But it is a certainty that, if there is a world in one hundred years, people will still be reading books about The Beatles, and that goes doubly for THE books about The Beatles. So what Mr. Lewisohn is selling isn’t the usual short-term hit, but a property with longterm legs. There is MONEY in the Beatles, and it’s not drying up anytime soon. Every time Disney launches some new Beatles-thing, his publisher will have a marketing opportunity. When Apple authorizes <em>Beatles: The Hologram</em> in the Sphere in Vegas, Mr. Lewisohn’s books will sell 25% more that quarter. Mr. Lewisohn, and Mr. Lewisohn’s publisher whoever that is, will “draft” behind much bigger corporations for decades to come. “A book about the Beatles written by Mark Lewisohn” is the Holy Grail of book publishing: <em>a book that sells itself</em>. It does not need a conventional publisher to get a pile into the corner bookshop, so browsers can happen across it. It does not even need chat shows to have Mr. Lewisohn on. The fans are the buyers; and because the fans are intensely connected, the marketing will take care of itself.

So I wouldn’t publish Volumes II and III conventionally if I were him. If I were him, the first thing I’d do is start the UK version of an LLC. Then, after rallying all my pals in the Beatle fan world--podcasts, YouTube, Reddit, blogs--and using the mailing list that I hope he’s been gathering from his stage shows -- I would set up a 21-day Kickstarter with a funding level of $1 million. And I’d set the following pledge levels. Ish.

$2--gesture of support
$10--PDF of Vol. II
$30--Vol. II softcover
$60--Vol. II Kickstarter-only hardcover (some special feature)
$250--signed, numbered Vol. II in hardcover (250 total)
$250--Extended Edition Hardcover
$500--signed, numbered Extended Edition (50 total)
$1,000 weekly private Zoom lectures for a year (available to academics, too!)
$2500--”Patrons” thanks in both books (100 total)
$10,000--attendance at a Beatles Weekend in London or Liverpool, the “Davos” of Beatle fandom. (25 total)

I firmly believe that this would gather well over $1 million in pledges. <em>Pledges</em> is key here -- it’s understood that Mr. Lewisohn can take as long as he needs to finish, with those funds in the LLC invested in 4% government bonds or whatever. And THEN, after Volume II was completed, and the pledges were fulfilled, I’d either sell the books myself until the Sun explodes, netting $12+ on each softcover, and $30+ on each hardcover or, if they gave me a deal too good to refuse, I’d sell some big publisher the right to sell the book in stores, at a price higher than my pledge levels. But either way, I’d have plenty of money and time to finish Volume III.

If Mr. Lewisohn does this, not only will he have plenty of resources, he will have mailing lists of people that he can sell things to (merch; cheap tickets to in-progress research talks; Volume III when it’s ready). The higher tiers may reveal people useful in research or interviewing, or simply a group of ride-or-die supporters that he can call on. It’s always good to know rich people, and lawyers, and rich lawyers.

I am familiar enough with British mores to recognize that all this may seem rather grubby and commercial; but Mr. Lewisohn’s reputation is beyond reproach, and publishing via a self-owned entity would be no black-mark. For someone in his particular spot -- needing money to finish a book he then would need to sell -- it’s simply the most efficient method. And it flips the power dynamic: a high-profile crowdfunding campaign, <em>if it funded</em>, would likely attract a lot of interest from conventional publishers; it demonstrates scale of market, which is the major bone of contention in any book negotiation. Instead of the usual loggerheads -- “Well, you only sold x copies of Volume I, so we’re going to offer you 50% less money for Volume II” versus “You guys marketed Volume I poorly, and Volume II is about the mania, which should sell much better, so you should give me 50% MORE” -- there’s a hard number, the crowdfunded number, that’s an incontestable reality. If a $1 million Kickstarter seems too much, do $500,000 or even $250,000. Whatever it ends up earning, that number would be the obvious floor for any subsequent conventional deal. “If you really don’t think you can sell more than me going direct to fans, then I don’t think you have proper confidence in this project.” Money in one’s pocket makes one choosy. :-)

Fan groups are particularly well suited to crowdfunding, and the Beatles have the biggest permanent group of fans I can think of, as big as the biggest sports teams, but international. Having been an author, and now a publisher, I just don’t see any reason that Mr. Lewisohn should not secure the funds he needs, plus more, directly from his customers in advance, so that he can spend the rest of his life researching and writing -- getting the story right. Finally, allowing fans to play such a direct role gives them a stake in his books, a stake that might even change his situation with Apple. Today, Mr. Lewisohn is the single most respected writer on a fascinating pop cultural subject; well-funded, and with a direct line into 100,000+ buyers of Beatlestuff? Truly comfortable, unassailable, and thus able to go anywhere the data takes him. Publishers have their agendas, which are not what fans want; Apple, too, has its own agenda. But in this instance, Mark Lewisohn and millions of fans have the exact same goal -- getting these books done, and done right -- and crowdfunding might be a perfect solution. ◊

Beatles obsessive MICHAEL GERBER is Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander, an all-star print humor quarterly. Most issues contain Beatle-related Easter eggs.

Every year it gets harder; last year a friend was a Finalist. “He’s always been a great writer,” my college buddy said, also a non-nominee. “Ed’ll win it someday,” I said. That Finalist used to edit Jon and I, and for that alone he should receive some sort of medal.

This year, I know TWO Finalists, Bystander cartoonists Ivan Ehlers and Peter Kuper. And what do I say to soothe all of these almost-Pulitzers, plus total non-Pulitzers such as Jon and myself? “Pulitzer winners may have fame, pride in their work, and the esteem of their peers, Jon, but you know what they will never have?”

“Medical debt?”

“Good clean fun.”

But the Pulitzer-winning newspapers disagree with me. To places like the NYT and WaPo, the real fun’s in executive suites, in swanky clubs, and restaurants where it’s just impossible to get a table. This, from the three-Pulitzers-heavier New York Times: “A lot of things make Lauren Sánchez Bezos ridiculously happy. Helicopters. Fashion. Protecting the narwhal. Her little sister, Elena. Her five best girlfriends. And, of course, her new husband, Jeff Bezos.” Ugh.

I used to love newspapers. Regular readers of…whatever this is, will recall that I spent a formative chunk of my young life in a couple of taverns in St. Louis, Missouri. There was the old Llywelyn’s, down in the Central West End (now closed), and O’Connell’s (still with us). My mother waited tables at both places, and I sat and ate hamburgers and talked to whoever would talk with me. I became sort of pals with lots of adults, as much as any seven-year-old could, and several of these pals were newspapermen (Martin Quigley and Harper Barnes, among others). This was probably when my ambition to become a writer was born.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was writing a humor column in my school paper, to enough acclaim that it got me into Yale. The first week I was there a fellow Freshman called down to me in the rotunda of Bingham Hall. “Are you the Mike Gerber from Trapeze?”

(The Trapeze was the name of my high school paper.) Yes, I was, I responded.

“We used to read you all the time,” the woman yelled. “We swapped copies with you guys. I had to get the mail first, because people would steal it. Are you writing here?”

Yes, I said, I’d just snagged a column in a campus paper.

“Well, be funny,” she said, equal parts anticipation and challenge.

• • •

During the back half of college whenever I’d return home to Chicago, I’d go down to the Loop and get myself a hamburger at the Billy Goat, the legendary bar beneath Michigan Avenue. Right smack between the Tribune and the Sun-Times, the Billy Goat was nationally famous from a sketch on SNL, and locally famous from the satirical columns of Mike Royko. I’d chew my burger and drink my Old Style and think about how much fun it would be when I would write for a big city newspaper, and how I’d make up characters and get to know the city and get fan mail and hate mail. (I’d already gotten plenty of both, and found I liked each, for different reasons.) I’d make jokes that would rocket around the city, just like the ones that were rocketing around Yale now, and pull pranks and do some good and generally have a ball. I’d be like Pete Hamill in New York, or Royko, or Herb Caen, or Dave Barry down in Miami.

What an excellent life that would be! And I was right on schedule.

I don’t have to tell you what happened next, because it happened to all of us.

• • •

It’s my 35th college reunion this May—two weeks from this Friday—and I won’t be showing up. I don’t have time and, to be honest, don’t have the heart. Like everybody, I’ve had my fair share of success and failure and this deep into middle age, nobody really gives a shit. Organs fail, skin blossoms into cancer…We’re all getting to the point where you’re just glad to be alive.

I’m blue about something a lot deeper. No university, Yale included, can thrive in an anti-intellectual Christofascist kleptostate. What is a place like Yale for, if not to rise up in frosty Puritan self-regard and protect the values of the country? Where are all the Preppy patrician assholes jealously protecting their piece of the rock? Why did it put us through all that, if when our time came, we didn’t have the skill or the money or the guts to prevent any of this? What could we possibly talk about, smiling and perspiring under those white-and-blue tents? “Tomorrow’s leaders, huh? Guess we blew it.”

It’s nobody’s fault, it’s everybody’s fault. It’s such a fucking drag.

He’s not even smart. Or handsome. Or funny. The man is not attractive in any way. He cheats at golf, eats like a seven-year-old, and poops his pants in meetings. His henchmen and -women are repellent buffoons. He is appallingly disrespectful to our soldiers, and extravagantly blasphemous. He hates animals, even dogs.

Yet he persists, because he’s wired up the Supreme Court, and the small number of Republicans who could stop all this right now are too scared or greedy to do anything. What’s enough? Not goons in the streets killing soccer moms. Not war in the Middle East. Nukes? What will make Rufus Cornpone (R-MS) act? Maybe nothing. Because let’s be honest, he’s probably got a semi thinking about the Rapture.

And there’s no way to satirize any of this, because apparently none of it matters. You disagree, I disagree, but fuck us, apparently we’re going on the ride, all the way, and wherever it leaves us, well that’s where we’ll be. Meanwhile, journalists give each other awards as if things are normal, as if newspapers as they were still existed. And the rest of us stumble around, knowing every institution pledged to protect us—the House the Senate the courts the Democrats the media the law and yes, even the hoity-toity schools—has left us to the wolves.

The only fucking thing that deserves a Pulitzer in 2026 is this: how the fuck do we get out of this alive?

• • •

Winner for PUBLIC SERVICE

The Washington Post and The New York Times

The Pulitzer committee honored these two newspapers jointly for, as it put it, “helping the U.S. transition into authoritarianism as smoothly as possible. We are aware that giving the award to both papers mutes the honor somewhat, but,” the committee said, “we did not want to pick sides.” ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander, a quarterly humor magazine. Courtesy laughs are accepted. Thank you.

From the moment I was born, I wanted to be an Old Guy. Old Guys shave, and don’t bitch about it; sometimes, if they’re flush, important or both, they even pay other Old Guys to do it for them.

I remember how happy I was at 11 when I first began shaving. “That’s one small scrape for Mike, one giant leap towards being an Old Guy.”

First of all, there’s gear. I’m convinced most men pick their hobbies based on gear; heck, we may even pick their professions that way too. My dad plays golf, and my brother used to climb rocks, but I have cerebral palsy which makes both of these more or less lethal (I took one golf lesson, and as much as I loved it—because Old Guys play golf—I nearly crushed my own skull on the backswing).

What kind of shaving gear do I have? I’M SO GLAD YOU ASKED. I have a brush—a Simpson, soft but firm, like being petted by a cute girl. To load said brush, I have two kinds of Proraso soap-in-a-tube from Italy. That’s my daily soap, but occasionally, I pull off a hunk of almond-scented Cella and use that for a while. I got it in 2008. When it comes to soap, I say trust the Italians; lots of shavers there. Best of all, I have a snazzy safety razor from Germany, a Merkur which I have used for 25 years and will use for at least 25 more, if I live that long.

How many things in your life stick around for 50 years? My Merkur is like a little chrome pet that never dies. And after I die, just say some mumbo-jumbo over my shaving gear. I’ll come back, at least for one more shave.

A lot of guys are totally turned around on shaving. A lot of guys say, “Oh I have a beard, it’s so much easier.” As if easy was the point. I reject this, just as I reject wearing pajamas on airplanes.

Not for nothing, when Romans started wearing beards (Nero!), things got corrupt. Do you trust J.D. Vance? What’s all that face-hair hiding, James Donald Bowman?

I had a beard for a while, but it made me look like a defrocked academic. A sort of “suddenly resigned and nobody knows why but there are rumors” look. When I shaved it off, everybody was relieved. Me most of all.

Plus I got to shave again! Every morning! Twice a day if I want! According to Ancestry.com, I’m only 3% Sicilian, but apparently that 3% is calling the shots. That 3% pushes around the other 97%. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shave. And don’t let nobody shave you, unless they’re related. Remember Anastasia!”

All right, Boss.

A lot of guys talk about shaving with real hate, like, “That restaurant made me puke” hate, but I don’t understand why. Shaving’s like cutting the grass (which I also love). Shaving allows a guy to start every day with a sense of real accomplishment. In this bloody scrum we call modern life, this hair-pulling, eye-gouging 24/7 Clouseau’s valet sneak attack we must endure until the grave, how many jobs are ever really finished? But when you’ve shaved, it’s over. The proof is there. Whatever else happens that day, nobody can take your clean cheeks away from you.

I hear the question now: “What about cutting yourself?” Cutting myself is my favorite part. A lot of guys feel this way, we just don’t tell anybody about it. A good nick makes you feel really alive, especially if you put that stingy powder on it.

I will give anti-shavers one thing, however: modern shaving is dumb. Spending $4 per for some five-blade Frankencartridge which lasts me a week (if that)—every time I shook it into the trash, it felt like a violation. And when I thought of the landfill—permanent garbage! Every week, one more thing for alien archeologists to go at with little brushes, carefully scraping away the radioactive dust. “The prevalence of this device, the use of which is unknown, suggests that it must have been some form of worship.”

And don’t get me started on shaving cream, which doesn’t work, but at least it gets into your mouth. I’m sorry people in the 1930s had to eat Barbasol, especially since they had the Great Depression to deal with, too. But it’s time for that shit to be retired—they would want us to. They would insist upon it.

I could go on all day. And we haven’t even talked about the next part, maybe the best part: aftershave. Because when you’re an Old Guy, things are decaying. But there are compensations, there are always compensations. ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander humor magazine. He lives (and shaves) in Santa Monica.

Now you’re sleeping all the time, hiding in the closet, in low cabinets, wherever you feel safe enough to battle whatever it is you’re battling. It could be all sorts of things. You’ve never been quite well, not even as a kitten—but you’re brave.

You didn’t used to be brave. There you were, weightlifter thick and ludicrously furry, Big Max, 16 pounds maybe even 18. You lumbered around like the bodyguard of a mafia don, an ex-prizefighter stuffed into a tuxedo with an extra sandwich in one pocket and some dame’s number in the other. All you needed was a toothpick in your mouth. Yet in those early days whenever anyone would come to the door, you would scurry. I’ve never seen a cat go flat like you, Max; you’d practically deflate. Ceiling fans scared you. The Roomba scared you. People walking on the roof. People talking in the hallway outside. Me laughing. Trash bags.

I think they used a white trash bag to catch you, when you and your sister were kittens on the streets of Venice. Both your parents had died, hit by cars, and you and Lola were forced to fend for yourselves. Lola, friendly curious, a fierce hunter with long arms and razor claws. She could snatch a bird out of the air and did, I’m sure, to feed you. Tiny little wooly you, hiding somewhere with a stomachache, and Lola would bring things back. Enough to feed you, and the worms in your tummy.

And what thanks did she get? When you were well and full of beans, you’d sit on her. Yes I’m telling everyone—you would sit on your sister all the time. Please apologize before you go.

Because you are going, I know that, and I’m already missing you so much. I’m so proud of you, my big little guy, my little big guy, so proud that “the sickest kitten I ever saw”—that’s what the rescue person said—managed to heal and get strong and impossibly furry and run around and play. King Kong vs. Godzilla with your sister, both reared up on your hind legs, swiping and swatting and toppling over. Two years suddenly seems a long time ago. You can rest now, your undefeated record is safe (Lola wants me to tell you she is also undefeated). I’m very proud of you, Maxy. I show pictures. I will keep showing pictures.

I’m sorry we never got to take you to Big Bear to see the snow, like Kate wanted. I wanted to see it stuck to your wooly underfur, your magnificent white cravat, your pink nose that got pinker whenever you ate. You’re a bounder, Max, a tree climber, a fierce Norsk skogkatt, one of the pullers of Freya’s chariot. I can’t imagine you having a job, exactly, but you’d do anything for a pretty lady—that’s why Kate was the only one allowed to wipe your bottom.

Max, I don’t think you ever pooped in the litter box. Maybe nobody taught you how, but to be honest it seems pretty intuitive to me. Every morning I’d wake up, stumble into my bathroom, and there would be a little pile of brown soft-serve right next to my toilet. Same place, same consistency. I’d clean it up without complaint—you’re the only person I’d do that for, Max. I often wondered if you were trying to tell me something. Now I know what it was: “I’m one of those guys who’s so handsome he can get away with shit.” I’m not judging, I’m kinda one of those guys too, but…you just lounge around like Cary Grant on the sofa, in your cat-sized felt yurt, on the beach in Monte Carlo, and when you’re hungry you jump up to your bowl, and stare at us until we fill it. Then you will not eat until one of us stands next to you and whispers that you’re a “good boy, the best boy” as you gobble it up quickly and grunt and greedily fill your little belly.

What a pain in the ass! I really wish you’d do that again.

Try not to feel too bad about the snow—I feel bad enough for both of us. I haven’t been a very good owner. If I was a tech guy instead of a writer, we could go to the best vets, secret cutting-edge CRSPR-jocks who would replace all the organs that are failing. Do oligarch cats die? Of course they don’t. With nanobots in your kidneys you could hold out indefinitely. If there’s any cat who deserves The Singularity, it’s you, Max.

But you get to a certain age, my boy, and you realize that you can’t do everything, can’t go everywhere. Ya gets what ya gets. Life’s big problems will remain unsolved; the tragedy you were born into will remain unredeemed. Still you can, if you’re brave, look around at wherever you ended up and think, “This is pretty good. I did all right. I’m safe and loved.”

Because you are safe, my little Maxy, and you are loved, and you always will be. And someday when we’re together again, when you’ve gotten me a daypass to Valhalla or wherever the best skogkatts go, you and I will jump around in the snow. I hate the cold, you know that, I even close the window at night. But I’ll do that for you, Max. I’ll get slush in my sneakers just to see you well again, well like you’ve never been, bounding, snuffling, pink-nosed. That day you will climb pine trees like a little lumberjack, with your strong arms and back legs, and claws so sharp you’d pin my hand. You will attack your sister (we both know you will do this), and then we’ll laugh together—“Remember what the rescue named you? “Vega”? How SoCal can you get?” Kate will pull out some salmon, and we’ll eat it together the four of us, and life will be as fine as a Hemingway story.

Don’t wait to go, Maxy, there’s nothing to worry about, and nothing more to do. Kate and I will take care of Lola, and everyone will be okay. Just please don’t forget me; I’ll never forget you. You have been such a good friend to me. If you’re still around when I get there, don’t worry, I won’t pick you up no matter how excited I am to see you—I know you hate being picked up. I’ll just give you a slow blink, and scratch the base of your tail. Then you’ll lead me, just like to your food bowl, and I’ll follow. And when we get to that little clearing in the forest, quiet, peaceful, you and I will play together in the snow.

POSTSCRIPT: At 7:20 Pacific on April 22, Maxy died. He was, to the end, brave. ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander, an erstwhile humor quarterly. Max is survived by a very pretty sister, Lola The Hunter, and two humans sad-but-grateful.

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“Surely, the assignment editors at these publications do some research into how a book is selling before approving lengthy think pieces,” Robinson writes. “That’s how you avoid covering a local junior high talent show. However, it seems as if people were determining relative news value based on chatter within that tight bubble. Slate ran a profile about West and her book — which triggered an ugly response from West’s husband who everyone loathes now — that was filed under the category “Fame.” That seems like a stretch.”

Nice burn. Anyway, I put fingertip to keyboard because this paragraph shook loose something I learned about the big-time book and mag biz back when I toiled in Manhattan’s carpeted hallways in the mid-1990s. Something that is fundamental to both of those industries, and why they have so much less throw-weight now than they once had. And the realization is counterintuitive, especially if you’re a reader — a person who loves books and magazines, and believes in them as something that lasts.

Books and magazines are not published for readers. They are published as part of a complex kabuki going on inside corporations, to benefit the people inside the book imprint or magazine. It’s not simply that Lindy West is someone who clearly matters to people in New York publishing—and I hasten to add that I have read her online work, and also her 2016 memoir Shrill, liking both. It is that “polyamory” as a topic is something that the precise type of person who works in New York publishing is going to be fascinated by. People have been coupling in all sorts of interesting ways for as long as there have been people; “polyamory” on the other hand, is practically Greek for “Brooklyn.”

To survive as an editor at a publication or an imprint is a social accomplishment. I don’t say this disrespectfully, and don’t think it’s ever been much different (with the caveat I explain below). At least that’s the way it was in the Nineties; I remember being shocked when I discovered that a girl I was dating had been put in charge of Cosmo’s sex quizzes without ever having gotten past third base. (We soon rectified that and, bona fides earned, she dumped my sorry ass.)

What gets published, and once published, promoted, is pretty much up to the whims of a hierarchy. These decisions are achieved not by data, but by the perceptions of power, of potential, of “heat”—in other words, the story around a book. Which makes sense, everyone in publishing is a sucker for a story, and with every book they are trying to create the story that sells the product.

The other thing is, because careers in publishing are so financially difficult, the caste of people who can become editors, narrow in the Nineties, is almost certainly narrower now. I remember my first conversation with a headhunter, back in 1991. “What kind of salary are you looking for?” I paused for a second, and added up the monthly nut for the studio on 88th Street between 1st and York I was sharing with my girlfriend, who was working at Christie’s auction house. “$31,000,” I said.

She laughed in my face. “Where the hell did you get that number?”

“My monthly bills.” I still don’t know why I blushed.

All this is a long way of saying, Lindy West’s book was published not because there was a guaranteed audience for it among book-buyers, but because it appealed to the real audience: book editors, publicists, and apparently, assigning editors at major newspapers. Those people are not readers. Readers are assumed (often wrongly).

In his piece, Robinson speaks of the days when words-on-paper was a truly mass taste—before, I’d argue, readers had been purposely and systematically trained to divorce content from commerce. He mentions that Lewis Grizzard, a successful newspaper humorist of the second-rank, used to move the kind of numbers today’s writers would commit murder on BookTok for. “1979’s Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A Good Beer Joint Is Hard to Find and Other Facts of Life (his titles were famously long-winded and this parenthetical explanation hasn’t helped) sold 75,000 copies in its first week,” Robinson wrote.

There are a million reasons why humor books don’t sell like they did 47 years ago, and as the publisher of a humor magazine (and now books), I can list them all. There are a million more reasons why newspapers are pretty much a spent force, and magazines more a lifestyle signifier than something that moves our culture. But there’s one reason that I never hear mentioned, and it’s what I thought of when I read Robinson’s piece.

Among people who still care about such stuff, Esquire of the 1960s is considered to be the high point of American periodicals. I still remember the day I discovered the tall, colorful, ridiculously bountiful issues in the old Periodicals Room at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. Even though I had no time—in September 1987, a history degree was still a matter of reading endless pages of print—I ate bound volumes until the librarian kicked me out at midnight. In that era of New Haven, being anywhere but your bedroom at midnight was a physically dangerous proposition, but I was a man ensorceled.

As beautiful and influential as his magazine became, Hayes had not been any kind of sure thing as editor; in the late 50s, Esquire’s aging bowspirit Arnold Gingrich had two deputies: Hayes, and a man named Clay Felker. Both men were brilliant editors, but very different people. Felker was urbane where Hayes was rumpled, Felker socially prominent and well-connected where Hayes was a literary ex-Marine. The biggest difference—to me, at least, and I suppose 39 years of editing later I suppose my opinion counts for something—was Felker’s interest in the “zeitgeist.” Felker was obsessed with identifying, and if necessary, creating, the micro-trends that shimmer through certain influential groups of people at certain times. After all, Felker was part of those groups; he always had been. Hayes was not. I seem to recall Felker once saying, “What Harold doesn’t know could fill a book.”

I’m overstating this dichotomy for the purpose of brevity; Hayes could and did traffic in zeitgeisty features (1970’s post-Manson “California Evil” has stuck with me across the decades), and Felker pulled off tons of old-fashioned journalism. And the boundary can be cloudy; an authentic shift in the zeitgeist is authentically news.

Gingrich picked Hayes, and launched that magazine into the stratosphere. Felker, stung, first moved to the Sunday magazine of The New York Herald-Tribune, and then to New York magazine, which he co-founded in 1968. Felker’s obit in the New York Times—he outlived Hayes by nineteen years—summed up his take on magazines nicely: “[At New York, Felker] adopted a tone that was unapologetically elitist, indefatigably trendy and proudly provincial, in a sophisticated, Manhattan-centric sort of way.”

Hayes’ Esquire was tremendously influential within the mag-biz, but Felker’s book was even more so—New York spawned the modern city magazine, each one crawling with editors and reporters looking for the next trend. And by the time I prowled the carpeted hallways, basically every magazine (save The New Yorker) was one big zeitgeist-hunt. From Wigwag to Seven Days to Out, every big magazine was now a kind of fashion magazine, and the editors who rose within them were not necessarily enamored with words or ideas, but people obsessed with questions of taste. The one piece of essential equipment for any post-Felker magazine editor was to have an endless desire to tell one’s readers—peons who clearly didn’t know better, or lived in some benighted town where the editor is sure they’ve never even heard of “polyamory”—exactly what to do, eat, wear and think. To be hip.

If you sense distaste, you’re right; there’s nothing more boring than this week’s hot restaurant, or more useless than one guy’s opinion how some movie or TV show fits in with “how we live today”—itself a meaningless, bogus, brain-rotting concept. At best it’s snobby; usually it’s voicey bullshit, like a virgin writing a sex quiz.

What started in magazines swiftly moved to books—The Preppy Handbook is an example of this actually working, 2.3 million copies worth—and eventually to newspapers. By the advent of the Web, publications had replaced many of their facts, which are time-consuming and expensive to ferret out, with opinions handed down by star editors or writers desperate to mimic Seventies gadfly gods like Lebowitz and John Waters. Ah, the Seventies, zeitgeists were big enough to surf back then, when the Boomers were all living one version or another of the same kind of life. But by 1995, all many Boomers had in common were their memories (cue Rolling Stone), and my own generation, X, recoiled in horror at the very idea of something tying us all together (which of course was our zeitgeist, endlessly mined and commodified). But as media fragmented and the miners mined, it became harder and harder to hit upon authentically new trends and ideas; The Preppy Handbook has launched a thousand clones, none of which has sold or endured like the original.

The publishing business I encountered was a place where you studied the editor—how he wore his leather jacket, or what bags she owned—and attempted to replicate their taste, in how you dressed, talked, thought, and wrote. I don’t know what Esquire in the 60s was like, but the magazine itself shows it wasn’t like that; Shawn’s New Yorker was a cult only slightly less devoted than The People’s Temple, but there was enough intellectual curiosity in TNY’s self-conception to keep the worst elements of Zeitgeist-hunting at bay. (A lot of the furore about Tina Brown was precisely this tension, and the things that injured her, like having Roseanne Barr guest-edit the mag, were examples of zeitgeist-editing gone awry.) But the hunt continued because by the 1990s, if a magazine was big enough, and respected enough, it could define the zeitgeist. Regardless of format, that’s where the real money and prestige can be made.

Then again, every time it guesses wrong, the magazine, book or newspaper loses a little authority. It’s a gamble. What does Trump mean? We went to a diner in Sheboygan—

So what do all these late-night thoughts have to do with Lindy West? Simply this: we have a generation—or two, maybe three?—of editors who do not see their jobs as journalism or any kind of cultural caretaking. Instead, they have spent decades honing their ability to sniff out trends and, if necessary, make them. When it works, it’s just business as usual. But when it doesn’t—when you mistake the obsessions of your own very narrow priestly caste as something important, something meaningful—you get Lindy West’s memoir.

Which will, I can assure you, be nothing more than a single disappointing line item on this season’s list. She might not even get paid less for the next book. There will be no embarrassment; no sense of what else might have been published instead; no sense of ignoring things that really must be talked about; no sense that Ms. West was sabotaged by the current process, or her readers trained to be a little dumber. The chase will simply begin again, with the P&L’s hauled out and the fingers stuck into the wind…what was it that Simone said at brunch? What was it that just opened in the West End? And all those smart people will chase after something that does not matter, well-shod ants creating that daily pile of nonsense called The Discourse. The better to keep the job, increase the paycheck, and avoid all the things that we really should talk about, before the world explodes. ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor and Publisher of The American Bystander. His books have sold 1.25 million copies in 25 languages. Maybe he’ll write another one someday.

After that thought, I pulled out my fingers and counted—it’s been just about ten years that our national life has been dominated by Donald Trump. Trump, too, is an addicted, abusive career criminal, but his gang is not a handful of crusty hippies and a brainwashed heiress, it is the entire Republican Party and increasingly, the national security state. The SLA robbed a bank to fund its inanities and insanities; Trump is looting the entire government.

Politics Knowers labor incessantly to make sense of Trump, but there is no sense to be made. Like “Cinque” and leftism, Trump cobbles together whatever bits of rightwing flotsam rhyme with his mental illness that day. And it changes; that’s how come he was the isolationist “America First” peace candidate in 2024, and today is the proud invader of Venezuela, Iran, and pretty soon Cuba. (Note to self: stock up on cigars.)

To follow someone like this is madness. The algebra of human relations do not apply to them. Whether they help you or hurt you or decide to kill us all is completely random. They are fully in service to their mental illness.

Some Trumpers are getting this, finally, but probably not enough, and certainly not quickly enough. The media will continue to impose order on this profoundly disordered man until he is dead, and afterwards as well. If your life seems utterly meaningless, as mine sometimes does, we all have at least one reason to keep going for as long as possible: we have to tell everyone how fucked up Donald Trump was. Hating him has to become like celebrating Christmas, something that even if you think it’s kinda cringe, it’s part of the bedrock of our economy.

MAGA will, like the SLA, spin out death and chaos until it wears out or is stopped. But there’s a big difference: the SLA’s message was not being pumped out by multiple networks. The SLA were a tiny sliver of stinky lunatics counterbalanced by the rest of American society which was, if not wise or good, functioning well within the boundaries of normal human…well, stuff. Jerry Ford was, if anything, an anti-charismatic leader; no one would’ve followed him to the grocery store. Nelson Rockefeller, though rich (at least for those days), was enough of a regular guy to die in the saddle with his mistress. Most of us shared a consensus reality. Other people were not, in 1974, considered to be NPCs; if you played your cards right, you might be able to have sex with them. We all sat in gas lines together, trying to get laid, staring up at the sky pondering Skylab. We got our news from Walter Cronkite, not @Daddylovesfeet420.

The difficulty we face today isn’t simply the narcissism and impulsiveness and reptilian cunning of another doomed addict leader, driven to do awful things by forces he can’t even articulate. That is bad enough. We also face a kind of psychological decay in the society which makes the leader’s mental disorder difficult to perceive.

We all know the symptoms of this disease. Narcissism. Bombast. Monomania. Persecution complexes. A taste for private islands. Bunkers. An obsession with largeness and domination. Craving for immortality. Vulnerability to weird conspiracy theories, lousy SciFi, and “thinkers” selling a media-mutated version of a calmer, well-ordered, authoritarian past. A hatred of education as the only thing that can pierce the bubble. A lack of empathy so profound other people aren’t even real. You could call this “Main Character Syndrome,” which not only makes life into a movie, it means life has to have ever-increasing drama.

Viewed this way, the Iran war isn’t a conflict as we used to define them. There are no foreign policy objectives to agree or disagree with. There is no authentic sense of mission. Donald Trump doesn’t want peace in the Middle East, any more than Cinque wanted a leftist Utopia. Both men simply wanted action, distraction, conflict, victory, death.

The attack on Iran wasn’t thought through because it was never a policy; it is a pitch from a writer’s room. It is a plot twist, an upping of stakes, a way to keep people watching. When drama is what the boss wants, that’s what he gets. Good government is lousy content, and insanity is “must see TV.”

None of these are new thoughts which, in a sense, is also an indictment of our society. When such stuff trickles down to the brain of the editor of a print humor magazine, you know it’s obvious. But I gotta say something, because…it’s getting worse, and I think I know why.

You could see this strange disorder in the past; Henry Ford might’ve had it. Certainly the oilmen and other funders and founders of America’s post-New Deal ultra-rightwing show similar signs. These people had won capitalism and could avail themselves of anything their world had to offer…but they chose instead action, distraction, conflict, victory, death.

Today this disease has spread through our elites so thoroughly that we seem to have reached a tipping point. Everybody is wearing shoeboxes on their feet and collecting their urine in bottles. The illness now seems so widespread that to rise, to compete, you have to manifest it. Sure, capitalism and patriarchy are part of the story, but we’ve had those for a long time, and the President didn’t take the world to the brink of nuclear war for no reason. Every day Donald Trump is in office isn’t just a disgrace, it’s both a symptom of an illness out of control in one man, and something that causes the illness to grow ever worse in the rest of us.

Where did it come from, and how do we get well? How do we heal, before Main Character Syndrome kills us?

• • •

This morning a contributor to The American Bystander, the cartoonist Bob Eckstein, let me know that a cartoon of his we’d run was all over TikTok. The cartoon shows Donald Trump standing at the very edge of a precipice, with Jesus Christ about twenty feet behind him. The caption reads, “What Would Jesus Do?” A common enough type of joke, but excellently done, the work of an consummate jokemaker and cartoon craftsperson. Its popularity is no surprise.

The twist was, people had used AI to animate it, and now Bob’s work was going viral as something other than what he drew. The original cartoon, which in some sense combats Main Character Syndrome, was replaced by something in tune with it. In one little film, Jesus strides over to Trump, picks him up, and hurls him over the edge.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTkBwtqvD/

In another, Trump throws Jesus over the edge, to the delight of a cheering MAGA crowd.

These weren’t just a taking, they were a remaking created by people trying to say something different. It was Bob’s art, moving in the world expressing different ideas than the ones he had. Instead of being about the desire of so many for this terrible era to be over—a desire I profoundly share—and the relationship of that desire to another desire, one of being a decent, moral human being, and not letting the evil of the world turn us all evil, these were now simply expressions of rage and/or scorn, either towards Trump, his followers, or both. Trump is so bad, the film says, that even Jesus would choose to hurl him to his death. “Love thy neighbor,” cartoon Jesus says, “except for Trump.” Or, MAGA people are so bad, that they would cheer the death of Jesus himself at the hands of their lord and savior Donald Trump.

Bob’s original idea is full of tension, and thought, and humanity. The other ideas are just emotional release. Which is OK, but they’re completely flattened and heightened for social sharing. These new ideas wouldn’t have existed without Bob’s cartoon to do all the heavy lifting. Bob’s work, his decades of craft—not to mention his self-examination, doubt, and yearning to be moral——were necessary for these new, flattened versions to exist. The new versions were simple, limbic, brutal; just as relatable perhaps, but in effect the exact opposite of what Bob had put forth. In the original, the humor comes from recognition, holding this tension so many of us hold; in the remixes, the humor comes from the satisfaction of an evil man’s cartoonish death, an act of revenge signed off on by Jesus himself, or the painting of the MAGA cult as bloodthirsty hypocrites (which they are).

Once Bob had posted the cartoon on his socials, the crowd assumed nobody owned it, anybody could use it however they liked, and people did. Bob was, in effect, an unwilling part of a writer’s room. This has happened to Bob before, and other cartoonists I know, and while it is perhaps a signal that they are tuned into the zeitgeist, it has got to be infuriating. Culture can’t be free if it’s how you pay your rent, and what you express is who you are as an artist—someone shouldn’t take your cartoon, with your name on it, and express a different idea, any more than I should be able to make a car out of balsawood and call it a Tesla. Because if that happens, the very concept of a Tesla is blurred—there is no consensus reality. “BOB” changes from Bob Eckstein to some meaningless glyph.

But what happened to Bob Eckstein’s cartoon is simply how social media works; anonymous remixing, a race to the stickiest idea. Unfortunately, the stickiest ideas seem to be simple blurts of emotion, things that bypass the forebrain and take up residence in the amygdala. And that’s where the anonymity becomes essential; all of us are free to produce things as @Daddylovesfeet420 that we’d never make or say as ourselves.

But anonymity should always give us pause. You know who else hides their identities? Klan members! And ICE agents—an generation of online assholes using masks to do bad shit IRL.

Every day, for hours a day, Americans have listened to and then trained themselves to speak this bestial language of social media. Now it’s the “fuckin” language of the White House. The more demented Trump gets, the more in tune he is with social media, and that is why he hasn’t been removed—his dementia is proving useful. This isn’t authenticity, or even unbuttoned Casual Friday comfort. It is evidence of disinhibition from the one man on Earth whose inhibition is necessary to keep the rest of us alive. Donald Trump has never claimed to be a statesman, as much as our media labors to make him into one. Whenever he attempts to be a grownup, it’s embarrassing, and that embarrassment makes him lash out even more. Trump is simply our Shitposter-in-Chief. His vision of our country and its problems are shitposter-level thinking; his crusades are shitposter crusades; his solutions are shitposter solutions.

Why should the world respect such a leader? Such a country? Only because we have nukes, and that’s what Iran was about: “RESPECT ME OR ELSE.” It wasn’t politics that made the SLA pick Patty Hearst, kidnap her, starve her, rape her, force her to play its shitposter-level game of “revolution.” It was narcissism, cult behavior, and drug-induced brain-rot. It was media-as-domination. It was “RESPECT ME OR ELSE.”

Now imagine it, but with the President. Or with the richest man in human history. Or with those guys, and the ten other richest men, a bunch of podcasters and TV hosts…not thoughtful people, not serious people, just people very sick with Main Character Disease. A disease that drives you insane. A disease that whispers to you, “Don’t end all hunger, get obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist.”

The fate of Humanity may depend on how quickly Elon Musk can OD, or Trump. That’s what Iran was, a near-OD. This peace deal is us walking around Trump, slapping him awake, waiting for the dude with the adrenalin shot to roll up. We can’t take him to the hospital, we’re in too deep.

We aren’t American citizens any more, we’re unwilling enablers, or hostages, at the mercy of the brainwashed. We’re all just trying to keep the craziness manageable until he falls off the cliff. As much as we’d love to push him.

• • •

While we wait for these various cult-stories to end—hoping that one or more of them doesn’t take the world along with it—there is a pretty obvious way to make things better: stop using social media.

Yes, you’re addicted. I am too. We all are. We’re all so tired, and taking a little hit feels like it numbs the terror. But don’t be fooled; social media is the vector for Main Character Disease. Before Twitter, Donald Trump was just another rightwing asshole. Social media is a weird, unnecessary, self-destructive blind alley we’ve been encouraged to go down. If it were leading to anything good for children and other living things, we’d have known it by now.

When addiction spreads widely enough, it’s no longer seen as an addiction. What’s happened is that the addiction has warped society around itself. Remember being able to smoke on airplanes? That was always crazy, never normal, and only seemed that way because so many people were too addicted to nicotine to not smoke for an hour or two.

Someday—I hope soon, for all our sakes—social media will be considered like smoking. Of course it’s worse, much worse. Smoking is terrible for you, but it doesn’t make you insane. Social media is eating away our brains, like some prion in a food engineered to be as delicious as it is unsatisfying. It has replaced normal communication, so that anything outside of its superheated weirdness feels boring and stunted and dumb. We eat and eat for hours at a time, mesmerized, and then keep eating because we’re ashamed of what we’ve become.

But there comes a point when we must pull back from the trough and look around. Was it worth losing newspapers for this? Will it be worth losing all our artists—because if you don’t own your art, you can’t sell it, and if you can’t sell it, capitalism will kill you. Has it been worth losing our self-respect as a country? The respect of the world?

For all our faults, all our Cinques and the racial hell that created him, America used to be loved. After this weekend—these past 14 months—these last ten years—it’s time to ask: is “fuckin” social media worth “fuckin” dying for?

It’s all sick, and rewards sickness. Donald DeFreeze would have been one hell of a shitposter. ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander. He shares a birthday with both Che Guevara and Donald Trump. Take that, astrology.

You might wile away the hours while you’re waiting with this wonderful interview of Tom by his fellow cartoonist Jason Chatfield. Jason is, of course, a truly fine cartoonist in his own right, but as you’ll see, he’s also an extremely deft and perceptive interviewer. And Tom Chitty himself is a delight; you’ll see immediately why we wanted to publish the first long-form work by such a talented and charming fellow.

Go sign up at the Kickstarter pre-launch page, so you can keep “in the know” as Nooks and Crannies approacheth.

Let the wind blow. Spring is on the come, and nothing, certainly not a few pieces of flying frost, can stop it. Pitchers and catchers have reported, and in Florida and Arizona spring training is well underway. The Yankees lead the Tigers, 3-0; the Cards are edging the Mets, 2-1.

Baseball is not a sport; it is a process of refinement, of resolution, by which the true nature of a group of people is revealed. At the first pitch of Game 1 every squad is a mass of indistinguishable shapes, blurred by last year’s failure or success, by this year’s hopes and fears. Will the young shortstop fulfill his promise? “I remember last year, July maybe, where he went ‘way back into the hole, into short left really, stretched out far just grabbing it like an ice cream cone—then turned and fired and got him out by two steps. Haven’t seen that since the Wizard.”

Or will some old lion, a reclamation project picked up on the cheap, offer up one final roar? “Just a little pop in the lineup, that’s all we need. I’d be happy with thirty dingers—hell, I’d be happy with twenty-five. Maybe he’s washed up, but I loved him when I was a kid. According to him, he’s in the best shape of his life, but they always say that…”

Game by game, afternoon by afternoon, the teams slowly shimmer into view, refining and sorting themselves.

Even the fans are not immune to this process. How you react to your team’s fortunes reveals who you are. My club, the St. Louis Cardinals, is going through a downturn probably not seen since the late 1950s. They’re projected to do pretty poorly this year, as well. Baseball, with or without the sacrament of Budweiser, is a religion in St. Louis, and a winning team is viewed as fair recompense for a summer so humid it’s like living underwater. Summer in St. Louis is more than enough to justify murder, and I expect in the days before air conditioning, juries would likely acquit. After all, they were living through it too.

Since nothing can be done about the weather, the Redbirds are held to a certain standard. Cardinals fans aren’t entitled the same way fans from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are: “We deserve the best of everything.” But every down year does offend the St. Louisan’s sense of history, of continuity, how things ought to be.

Though St. Louis fans aren’t the paragons of gentility they were when I was a boy—the old Busch Stadium is the only place I’ve ever heard fans applaud an opposing player’s home run—they are reputed to have some extra decorum. This year, it may falter; they may have been pushed too far. Last year, there were empty seats at home games, the most powerful form of protest a St. Louisan can muster. When there are empty seats at Busch, anarchy is not far behind.

But by season’s end, if we are patient and attentive, the process will work its magic. The frauds will be exposed and fired, and we will have the usual haul of memories to tide us over, young shortstops going deep into the hole, veterans straining their aged sinews to crank one last improbable dinger. The hated Cubs are projected to be world-beaters; but they will fumble it, because that is history, continuity, how things ought to be. And even if they don’t, we will whip them too, if only once in a while, and after the 162nd game, a just sorting will be complete.

So much of America right now seems to cry out for this process. There are so many fakes and shysters begging to be brought low, so much needing to be hauled into a bright sunshine that reveals everything. The entire country needs a tough, demanding 162-game slog, to winnow out all the bullshit. Enough sweat to make the makeup run. Enough challenge to engage the brain. Enough toil, day after day, to place those who wish to work back at the front of society.

The cold came upon us quickly. Today here in Parkesburg it is thirty, and the skies are the color of lead. The birds that sang so happily yesterday when it was forty degrees warmer, chirp infrequently and with more than a little outrage. The weiner dog does want to go outside. It is snowing much harder even than when I began writing.

But Spring is here, and Spring Training, and soon the long, slow, unforgiving, entirely just process of winnowing and refinement will begin again, as it has for 150 years. Let it be hard, and fair, and take place in the sun, where all can see. Let us welcome it. Let the games begin. ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is the Editor and Publisher of The American Bystander, a print humor quarterly. The Bystander’s first book, Tom Chitty’s Nooks and Crannies of New York, will be Kickstarted on April 1.

Big doings today. We’re very pleased to say that the first original book project from The American Bystander is on the way.

It’s called Nooks & Crannies of New York: From the Chronicles of Baron von Shoogenheimer, by beloved cartoonist Tom Chitty, and it introduces a figure uniquely qualified to move through a city as though it were constantly keeping secrets.

If you haven’t met the Baron before, he is Tom’s long-running creation: an observer of minor streets, improbable corners, neglected details, and places that look ordinary until he decides they deserve a closer reading. He’s the most renowned explorer of the Edwardian era (that you’ve never heard of).

He is not a tour guide, exactly. He is more the sort of person who might stop in front of a side entrance, study it for a moment, and conclude that something important has almost certainly happened there.

That sensibility turns out to suit New York unusually well. The city offers him an endless supply of narrow passages, odd residents, overlooked signage, small mysteries, and useful places to sit while deciding what to do next.

Before the Kickstarter opens (April 1, 2026 — mark your calendar), Tom will be sending out short Field Logs — dispatches from cities, museums, cafés, public squares, bookshops, and other places that catch the Baron’s attention for reasons that are not always immediately obvious, but usually become clear midway through the second paragraph.

If you’d like those reports, and first word when the project opens, you can join the list here.

And if you’d like more of Tom’s work while you wait, you can follow his Substack here.

Actually neither, Roxy. What I am concerned with is the factual gap between the stories we tell under the labels of “established fact” or “history,” and what really happened. I suppose I am a yokel or at least a romantic to believe that there even exists “what really happened,” but I am just as the Midwest made me. History is a story a culture tells itself for whatever reason, and while I’m interested in that, for the topics I really care about (big or small), I’d like to know what really occurred, not just the facts that fit the paradigm.

I adore history and am fascinated—probably obsessed—by it; but the older I grow, the less I am convinced that the historical method can legitimately produce the certainty historians claim. When the topic is the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, who fucking cares, but with something more recent and more consequential, reality matters. Journalists are in a similar boat of trying to describe reality through the pinhole of verification, though when there is a big audience for it, and no big money pushing against it, journalism actually seems to work (this is why fantasy football managers have much better information today than ten years ago).

But so little that happens generates the amount or type of “proof” historians or journalists require. This leaves us vulnerable in certain important ways (see: Trump, Donald) and I am sick of it.

Quite apart from misleading or corrupted data, there is not enough raw data, or too much; errors in judgment, or poor or clumsy interpretation of the data; the needs of story-making (a clear and satisfying beginning, middle, and end); unconscious bias (what we might call “not enough self knowledge’); and finally, in some cases, conscious attempts to mislead for whatever reason.

In this light, I’m reminded of the old wisecrack about Hollywood—the more you know about how movies are made, the more amazed you are that anything good ever gets created. Confirming what really happened, then writing it, is devilishly hard.

• • •

For years, I ran one of the most popular Beatles fan sites, Hey Dullblog (named by my brilliant friend Ed Park). We talked about everything related to the Fab Four and their era, but one issue I found myself coming back to again and again was the gap between life as it is experienced, and what ends up being communicated to others as “history” or “journalism.”

In most cases, the data is too sparse for us to know much about a person’s life. But in the case of John, Paul, George and Ringo? These were/are the most chronicled people perhaps ever—more of their speech was recorded or transcribed, and more events of their lives photographed, than anyone else I can think of. The raw data is there, by Jiminy! Just as important, most of this data is trustworthy. The Beatles were fascinating to many, undeniably culturally important, yet not very consequential. (Like fantasy football.) The rewards for manipulating or distorting Beatle-facts—faking a photo, or concocting a quote—lay somewhere between scant and nonexistent.

(A small side note: AI will, or perhaps already has, made it so easy to engage in fakery that starting now Beatles fans cannot assume “data integrity,” to use Roxy’s term. People who are convinced that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were a longterm romantic couple, or that McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a double, will gin up “proof” for their obsession as soon as technically possible. For all I know, they’ve done it already.)

If the arranger is a journalist, all this raw data is winnowed to certain standards, and the resulting points are arranged into “news.” If an historian, the data is winnowed in a slightly different way, more perspective and analysis is added, and this becomes “history.” And if an obsessed fan writing on a silly website, the most permissive sorting is done, the loosest analysis is performed, and the story created is “a blog post about whether John and Brian DID THE DEED while vacationing in Spain in 1963.”

We don’t know whether John Lennon had sex with his manager in 1963; some evidence—including John’s own words—point towards “yes.” But neither man ever publicly admitted it. And this is not merely gossip; if Lennon had slept with Epstein, it’s likely that this gave him certain advantages over his bandmates, and it’s also likely that the other three of them either knew or suspected that this had happened, and this impacted, in some small way (or large one), the history of The Beatles. Whether or not Lennon had sex with Epstein had a huge impact on how it felt to be Lennon-in-the-presence-of-Epstein, and vice-versa. When writing history about The Beatles or Lennon or Epstein, this issue would be very important, and any historian would absolutely have to decide for themselves where they stood on the matter. What really happened?

But historians aren’t dropping “I” statements into their work, and doing so would diminish the supposedly objective cultural authority that history is for. “Even though Lennon’s close friend Pete Shotton reported that Lennon told him, ‘I let Brian toss me off,’ I personally think this is probably Lennonesque braggadocio. The introduction of a sexual relationship between Lennon and the group’s manager would be a wild card that no one could tolerate for long.”

Or, if the historian was a product of a younger, more queer-assimilated generation, “Since Lennon’s close friend Pete Shotton reported Lennon said, ‘I let Brian toss me off,’ some barrier of proof should be seen as met; and in any event, a dalliance between two consenting adults would not necessarily have any effect past the boundaries of that ‘dirty weekend’ in Spain in 1963.’”

Historians do not write things like this; they “let the facts speak.” But which facts, and how loudly?

And so (here is where Mike lights a cigar to help his failing brain), to write history is to create a story that primarily fits inside one’s own life and experience, one’s own perceptions of what is likely or unlikely, what makes oneself and others tick. But historians do not cop to this, and cannot do so without injuring the very objectivity and authority that make history different from Page Six.

This was a tension that I, personally, could not resolve.

And there is another, almost existential issue: To write history is to inevitably engage with people on the most personal, most intimate levels, levels people are likely to keep very private. How much of what drives us moment-to-moment is written down, or even spoken to others? The experience of Life is a vast iceberg; even in the case of the Beatles, what was written down, formally spoken, attested to by several reliable parties, was the merest tip of what happened. And, certainly if our goal is to understand them as people or learn something useful, perhaps that tip wasn’t even the most important part? The more years I pile up, the less I am sure that what is most worth remembering about my life will (or even could) be written down or transmitted to others. The more I think that the portions of ourselves floating above the waterline, which we endlessly shape so as to seem handsome or smart or worldly or wise, are of little consequence, and what we are and how we live and how we shape the world during our allotted three-score and ten, is really that vast bulk hanging in the dark depths underneath, breaking and reshaping and grinding and groaning, unseen, unknown, even by—perhaps especially by—ourselves.

• • •

It was my JFK reading that really brought this home, a mountain of data almost as big as that floating under The Beatles, but about something quite consequential that many people—and most of the key “sources”—had reason to lie about. 70–80% of homicides where the relationship is known, the perpetrator is an acquaintance, friend, or family member—so where are the sections of the Warren Commission on Kennedy’s affairs, especially Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of the man who handled covert action for CIA after 1962? Where is the section discussing how JFK was loathed by Allen Dulles, the spy chief whom he fired? Or Hoover, who similarly hated him, and was likely not to survive a second Kennedy term? Or the ambition of Johnson, who felt belittled by the whole Kennedy clan, and especially despised Bobby?

Of course those sections are not there, because Johnson and Dulles and Hoover were the prime drivers of the investigation itself. Now, for all I know, these men were completely uninvolved, and their consciences were as pure as the driven snow (in this regard at least). But any serious investigation of a murder would start with them, not be led by them, and that it fell to a group of citizen “kooks” to point out this obvious fact and try, long after it was possible, to remedy it—this is a flaw in how journalism was done in 1963 up to the present day. And that no major historian saw this as a horrific gap in the data, certainly in the first two or three decades after JFK’s murder, made me wonder just what it is historians of postwar American history think they do for a living.

I attended Yale during an era (1987-91) where it was considered to provide the best History education in the world, with a faculty loaded with people with deep, deep connections to the U.S. government in general, and OSS/CIA in particular. Whatever truth could be known about domestic covert actions in the 1960s, was likely inside someone’s head in New Haven. Someone tenured—that is, given the safety to speak as they wished. Why did they not speak it? There are at least two possible reasons.

The first is that they would have spoken the truth, but could not confirm it sufficiently given the rules of historical research. People who conspire for a living are not wizards who leave no trace; they are merely wise in the ways of leaving a trail too murky and contradictory to amount to proof. Also, people lie, and most historians august enough to carry a lot of weight are not brave enough to fling around such accusations. Perhaps they got as far as James Douglass has in his JFK and the Unspeakable. Douglass, being a peace activist and not an historian, can play by looser rules. In his biography of Allen Dulles, writer David Talbot has used similar leeway to come to the conclusion that the Warren Commission—which he said people quipped was “the Dulles Commission”—was wrong.

The second, and more dramatic, reason for the silence of the academy is that these historians, perhaps someone like my acquaintance Robin Winks, had seen a document, heard a story over martinis in Georgetown, or been present for an off-the-record conversation that revealed something deeply at odds with the official story, but kept it to themselves out of a misguided “the country couldn’t handle it.” Something like LBJ not revealing the Nixon campaign’s using Anna Chennault to squelch peace talks in 1968.

By the time I left Yale in 1991, it was clear that I could not practice history, not in any conventional way, because in the most consequential cases, the ones where tenure and institutional authority were really needed most, historians were not exercising their watchdog function. Nor were the journalists, so I couldn’t really do that, either. The pop culture could speak, and so I did that.

In everyone’s defense, intelligence services are trained to reduce, suppress, and if necessary destroy the kinds of evidence that journalists and historians need to practice their disciplines. We all know this, and in normal times, everyone sorta winks at it; yeah, George H.W. Bush was probably a CIA guy before 1976; yeah, Gary Webb was probably onto something; so was Danny Casolaro. But the problem should be obvious for anyone living through the Age of Epstein: there can be a painful state of knowing-something-awful-but-not-admitting-it, which is IMHO much worse than the damage of any single act. And that painful state can be used to keep a people less free. When Vladimir Putin throws someone out of a window, every Russian knows they didn’t fall, and that’s perhaps as useful as the removal of a rival. A country is only as free as its leaders are brave, and the rise of a truly unfree United States has been built, in large part, on a press, academic and political culture unwilling to speak any uncomfortable truth, and unable to metabolize anything more spicy than The West Wing. If someone does another “study” of Universal Basic Income, I’m gonna freakin’ plotz. JUST DO IT.

Humans get up to dark stuff. No serious person can deny that Donald Trump was a close associate of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and, in past eras, such an association would be more than sufficient for Trump’s speedy removal. The only fight now is whether our political system and the press which serves it is too corrupt, cowed, sclerotic or all three to take the obvious necessary steps. I mean, it’s worse than Teapot-Dome, right?

As far as Epstein is concerned, the journalists are, decades late, beginning to do their job. The historians, always delicate in their sensibilities, will likely steer clear until long after it matters. As in the case of JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X, it is falling to outraged citizens to provide the corrective energy, amid a steady chatter of disapproval from the authorities we count upon (and pay!) to protect us. “We cannot be sure,” say the journalists. “Give us fifty years,” say the historians.

How would this country have developed if the political murders of the Sixties never happened, or been properly investigated? We’d be closer to how things are in Europe, I think; certainly we’d be less neurotic, less armed, more sane. Because I think what happened matters, I firmly believe we wouldn’t be here, suffering under this President, and his paramilitaries, and his made-for-TV henchmen creating their own reality and forcing the rest of us to live in it. You kill a President, and a few national leaders, and before you know it, you’re living in a police state. The “kooks,” as wrong as they often were on the details, saw the big picture. Will the journalists and historians, looking through their pinhole, ever catch up? ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander humor magazine. Each issue is good for a Kennedy joke or two.

As we build out the Bystander archive, we’re revisiting pieces from earlier issues.

Today’s addition is an essay by Michael from Issue No. 3, written in late 2016, when he—like many people—still assumed Hillary Clinton would win the election.

The essay is about satire: how it works, how it overheats, and what gets lost when everything becomes a joke, all the time.

It’s very much of its time, but it doesn’t read as dated. If anything, it feels sharper now.

We’ve posted the full essay in the archive.

Read “Trigger Warning” in the Bystander archive

As always, the both this Substack and the archive exist to support the print magazine. Links to the issue and to donate are at the bottom of the piece.

Let us see if it can get us through the thicket.

I have been fascinated by conspiracy theories since I was a child. This occurred for two reasons. The first is personal, the presence of a family secret that was kept from me for decades; it was benign, and need not be discussed here. But in doing me this kindness I think there was created an atmosphere of…something more to be discovered? Some hidden facts that would explain everything?

Something important had happened before I was born, and I was determined to find out what it was. This led to my interest in history, one of my life’s truest loves. But in this quickening I was also given a real distrust of the techniques of the historian and the journalist. They are fine as far as they go, which is not very far, and so the stories we call “history” or even “the factual record” are never complete, and often not even true.

The idea beloved by internet skeptics, that “two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead” is false. I know it’s false. You probably do, too—think of the last surprise party you threw. Secrecy is a force-multiplier, to use the military term, and secrecy is built by wealth and power, and vice versa. To combine, then act in secret is such a strong human urge, it’s probably biological and, like other biological urges, denying it causes much more trouble than simply acknowledging it and working to lessen any collateral damage.

This cigar is already an inch gone; I’ve got to speed up!

• • •

During the period of 1975-78—Mike-Years 6 to 9—conspiracies were in the news on a daily basis; this was the second factor in the marking of my mind. In the years after Watergate, Congress held lots of hearings: the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. After the front-page revelations came the historical maceration which, to some degree, goes on to this day. I would say that fully 25% of the American history I see young people referencing on the internet comes from this era, whether it’s factoids about LSD or COINTELPRO or trying to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar. (I am safe…so far.)

For a brief few years, not lying to the American people enjoyed some popularity; it was part of the patriotism of the Bicentennial. The spy-ers and liars and assorted Foggy Bottom apparatchiks were on the back foot, temporarily, and so we got a glimpse into the secret activities of the US government between 1946-1970 or so. (It should be said that we did not get a similar glimpse into the Soviet Union, which is Gen Z and after seem to think the US was a bad actor. But that is another post.)

Much of it was lost in burn bags, to be sure, but everything from the CIA’s involvement in the Italian elections of 1948, to the coup in Iran, to MK-ULTRA and Operation Mockingbird, to the plots to assassinate Castro, to Project Phoenix, and all the millions of pounds of murk around the political murders of the 1960s, all this was dumped at once into the consciousness of mainstream America. Deep in our Epstein era, it is difficult to explain how disorienting it was for average Americans to read that JFK shared a girlfriend with Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. (Then again, JFK shared a girlfriend with a significant portion of the planet—also something we learned in the late Seventies.)

This unique period of exposure—not just the investigations I mentioned earlier, but also things like Seymour Hersh’s My Lai investigation, C.D.B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire, the Pentagon Papers, and of course Watergate itself, created the political landscape we inhabit today. But not in the way you’d expect.

I would argue that the seeds of our current predicament were planted by a refusal to metabolize the revelations we learned then, and a preference for pretending to be moral, rather than doing the hard work of atonement. Who wants to atone? Not Americans. Not anybody, really—that’s why it’s called “atonement” rather than “all you can eat Surf ‘n’ Turf.”

I would argue that in the Seventies, Americans got their fill of truth, and while Carter’s pledge seemed like a good thing said by a good guy, by 1980 lots of people were thoroughly tired of knowing a bunch of shit they’d rather not think about, and furthermore were, in the privacy of their own pine-paneled rec rooms, questioning whether having a good guy as President was the best idea. Jimmy Carter was gifted in a way that most Americans—most people—are not, in his capacity to shoulder a moral burden, to see the right thing and do it. Much of the appeal of Ronald Reagan was his promise to return to how it had been before. To paraphrase: “We may try to kill foreign leaders again, but we’ll deny it, so you can, too. We’ll be bastards again, but bastards working for you.”

That never works out as planned. Not when Reagan implied it, or Trump says it.

This turning away has proved to be a kind of Original Sin, and it’s related to our original Original Sin, slavery. Ronald Reagan went to Mississippi in 1980, near the site of the 1964 Cheney/Goodman/Schwerner murders, and gave a speech on “states’ rights.” That was evil in plain sight—just like Trump loves to do. “You think we’re dogwhistling? You must be some kind of conspiracy theorist!”

• • •

It was during Reagan that the two most important parts of our current conspiracy architecture were put into place. First, Republican governments drew the exact opposite lesson from Watergate we thought they would—”Conspire more! And if you’re caught, never apologize!” Second, the press began insisting that the American public, for reasons never made quite clear, was infatuated by an irrational love of conspiracy theories. According to the press, the whole conspiracy thing was a cash-grab; but who do you think died richer, Mark Lane or Lee Atwater?

Taken in historical context, the Reagan campaign’s negotiating with the Iranians to cost Carter the election is probably less bad than say, Nixon’s doing the same with North Vietnam in 1968. The difference was that Reagan’s maneuver was seen not as something shameful to be hidden—not putting self over country to win an election—but as a wink-wink part of the spectacle. Reagan’s bit of light treason, obvious then and obvious now, was spun as proof that the Iranians wanted nothing to do with this new, tough Administration. Pulling off conspiracies became manly again. That’s why Iran-Contra came and went with neither Reagan nor Bush suffering any kind of mortal wound. Some people got mad, but there was no real danger of this obvious conspiracy getting in the way of either man’s branding, or standing.

Instead of pursuing the bastards, the press was busily setting up a set of new rules that persist to today. Rather than taking up any of the leads unearthed in the 1970s, the press began trumpeting the sexual peccadilloes of JFK (which wasn’t difficult to do), but also Martin Luther King. Proto-JFK Democrats were given the same treatment: Gary Hart—who’d served on the Church Committee—was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Presidential race after it was revealed he was having an extramarital affair…something his Republican opponent George H. W. Bush had indulged in for nearly 20 years. Bill Clinton, another proto-JFK with sexual judgment almost as poor as his hero’s, was actually impeached. After 1980, the only conspiracies which have counted have involved a Democrat’s penis.

Throughout this entire era, polls revealed that a solid majority of the U.S. believed there had been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, which the press weirdly dismissed as fan-girling a guy who was, in their estimation, kind of a sleazebag. No historians of the first rank engaged with any of the assassinations, even after Clinton signed the JFK Act mandating the release of all documents relating to the assassination (something that still hasn’t been done to this day). Oliver Stone’s flawed but fascinating movie JFK was pilloried by The Nation as well as The New York Times, while Gerald Posner’s elaborate retconning of the Warren Commission, Case Closed, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Vincent Bugliosi’s obsessive 2007 update, Reclaiming History, was a labor of scorn, pouring vitriol on the small group of citizens who tried to do what the Warren Commission should’ve done back in 1964. The issue, it seemed, wasn’t a shoddy, profoundly political investigation of the murder of a President, but that a bunch of “kooks” wouldn’t grow up and trust the government.

The exposure of all the stuff back in the Seventies hadn’t led to a more responsible or responsive Executive, or a vigorous watchdog Congress or press—quite the opposite. And by the 2000s, the idea of “conspiracy theory” as a type of insanity had been firmly cemented in the national discourse. Political murder—a happenstance as common as dirt—was relegated to the same cultural space as UFOs, or Bigfoot. And the murders that did happen, were relentlessly depoliticized; in America, it’s always a “lone nut” and everybody in power keeps their job.

Was it American Exceptionalism that drove US elites to act this way? Or a kind of intellectual decadence, shot through with base self-interest? What seems clear is that neither the Democratic Party nor the press, nor academia had any desire to engage either the historical conspiracies that so fascinated the public—nor bay for blood over the obvious and ongoing conspiracies of their own time. And so completely predictably, these things festered, and mistrust grew, and that mistrust grew into a tool of the very people who caused it in the first place.

Why this happened is a question we’re probably too close to answer; perhaps future historians will be able to answer it. What we can say is that it created a fundamentally more corruptible political culture in the US, which I believe led to Bush v. Gore; the hysterical and opportunistic reaction to 9/11; and the misguided and tragic War on Terror. And, eventually but also rather predictably, to our troll-President, as senile as Reagan but infinitely more venal, committing Iran-Contra level offenses almost daily. We now live in a country where regular document dumps connecting our President to pedophilia and possibly murder are somehow not sufficient for his removal. We now have armed, masked paramilitaries wreaking terror on Americans, at the behest of an unelected, possibly insane member of the Administration. An Administration that doesn’t give a damn about the democratic process or the rule of law—the only reason people investigated MLK or RFK or JFK in the first place. Because our leaders wouldn’t take conspiracy seriously, evil bastards have weaponized conspiracy theory to rip the country into pieces. Documents about JFK and MLK are released as a distraction, or to let Donald fucking Trump claim to be a champion of transparent, responsible government.

To be even more clear: because we never truly engaged with the facts of his dad’s murder, RFK Jr. turned into a drug addled lunatic obsessed with dangerous nonsense. In 1975, guess who was calling for a new investigation into RFK’s murder? Vincent Bugliosi. The facts of these murders didn’t change, the country around them did. Today, lying is where the money is.

In light of that, you might think, “Whatever Lee Harvey Oswald did or didn’t do is pretty goddamn small potatoes.” And I would agree.

• • •

So now, as my cigar peters out, I will share my thoughts on what to do about it. Actually, scratch that—I don’t know what to do about it, but I do have some suggestions that might keep you sane in an era of official untruth.

Be wary of any theories involving “the elites.” Groups of powerful people are likely at each other’s throats. Any conspiracy theory that fingers a shadowy group of the super-rich acting in concert over the centuries—the Rothschilds, the Bilderbergers, the Masons, the Elders of Zion (or another religion’s equivalent)—is bullshit.

Ignore race-based conspiracies. History shows us this is vile nonsense.

Anyone who uses the phrase “Crisis Actors.” If everybody called a paid protestor was actually paid, the economy would be a lot better.

Costs and benefits. If RFK Jr. is wrong about vaccines causing autism, lots and lots of people are going to die needlessly; if he is right, we’ll still have a lot of people dying, but fewer survivors will display certain personal characteristics RFK Jr. doesn’t like. On the other hand, if we all believed that Texas oil billionaires killed JFK, Texans, the oil industry and billionaires would all have a smaller say in our political life, which would be awesome. RFK Jr’s beliefs are dangerous; believing H.L. Hunt helped kill JFK is not.

Dismiss the “People Just Want to Believe” argument. Most people are sane; that’s what “sanity” is—the mental state of most people. And most people find conspiracies terrifying and horrible. No one would’ve questioned the official story of JFK’s murder if there hadn’t been a drip, drip, drip of odd data. Go where the preponderance of the data leads you. Nobody wants to believe our President is a pedophile—that’s just where the preponderance of the data is leading us.

Stop looking for The Magic Memo. “We killed JFK.—signed, William Harvey & James Angleton.” Successful conspiracies do not generate the kind of proof that journalists and historians insist upon; that’s how we know they are successful. And the need for “a formal conspiracy” is a fool’s errand. Successful conspiracies aren’t 100 people hashing out a document distributed via Google Docs; they are a hundred separate one-on-one conversations over time that lead to something big happening that benefits all 100, that each one can plausibly deny.

There are surely more rules, but I am tired; at 56, nicotine can only do so much. It is undeniable that we live in an age of conspiracy—meaning, an era increasingly dominated by small groups of powerful people coming together for their own benefit, using secrecy to avoid responsibility, and to multiply the effect of their actions. Too many of our watchdogs have responded to this with a form of (sorry for the overused word) gaslighting; but the pace and size of conspiratorial behavior is too much to ignore. And—perhaps most troubling of all—this era’s conspiracies are demonstrated in public, as a means of disheartening the rest of us. An earlier President might’ve secretly solicited donations for a grand new ballroom; or he might have arranged for inciting incidents before sending in ICE. But our political culture is so debased that such a fig leaf is no longer necessary; there is no political price to be paid anymore. In the wake of Venezuela, “secret incursions” seem almost quaint.

The good news is, mass action by citizens—individuals acting on their own morality, and coming together to fight for a vision of American liberty as old as the Revolution itself—seems to be working. This too is a conspiracy. The fight is going on in the streets now, but also in our hearts and minds. The American Revolution was a conspiracy; we are a nation of conspirators. So: pick your conspiracies wisely, and fight for the ones that will deliver to us true freedom and equality, true justice and morality. Learning to tell the difference between the Epstein Files and Pizzagate is a strange kind of patriotism, but patriotism nevertheless. ◊

MICHAEL GERBER is Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander which is a vast conspiracy masquerading as a humor magazine. He has finished that cigar.

BOB ECKSTEIN can be found on his Substack, The Bob.

Issue 31 of The American Bystander is now available.

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