"You’ve been in the folk tradition... I wonder how your attitude toward those types of songwriting have differed under President Trump..."

"... versus, at the time, under George W. Bush, when you wrote 'When The President Talks to God,' one of your best-known songs."

The NYT interviewer asks Conor Oberst, in "How Conor Oberst Survived Teenage Rock Stardom" (gift link).

Oberst answers: "You know, it’s really hard for me to even articulate the Trump era. Maybe at some point I’ll be able to do it. It’s like, you can’t satirize what’s already a parody. It’s already a disgusting, gross cartoon.... I’m sure it permeates everything I write, but to write directly toward, I found it almost impossible.... I mean, I’ve thought about it and I’ve had plenty of people be like, where’s the new 'When the President Talks to God'? I don’t know. It’s such an avalanche of insanity."

What is the origin and history of the idea that something/someone is beyond parody because what they already are is the parody?

I hadn't checked my Bluesky feed in a long time, but something made me go there today.

Here's what it offered me:

Why did I sojourn there? Meade, for his reasons, happened to text me a video I'd posted there:

That, along with the words "A New Day," made up my first post after I'd opened a Bluesky account. I had the idea of expressing something that might bring Trump lovers and haters together.

I see I only posted once more on Bluesky. It was the same day, the same minute:

A Lincoln Sunrise — yesterday, on the University of Wisconsin campus:

[image or embed]

— Ann Althouse (@annalthouse.bsky.social) October 18, 2025 at 4:20 AM

I see I got one like. It was probably Meade. This positive content thing... eh. Maybe I didn't try hard enough.

A woman dies and this is how she is remembered? For her "burning hatred for Trump"?

Now, this is just very sad. Imagine dying and that's the headline — how you burned with hate. Thanks, family. Thanks for remembering the hate.

Can you think of any other example of a person of note whose admirers remember them after their death for their burning hatred? I resorted to AI to search for examples of this kind of post-death praise for hating and I couldn't find one example. The closest I came was Muhammad Ali. He "hated" Frazier. Said things like "It's gonna be a killa and a chilla and a thrilla when I get that gorilla in Manila." 

There's a strong temptation to uglify what Trump has made such a show of trying to beautify.

There's all that water in the Reflecting Pool. Is it well guarded? There are all those fountains and statues. And then there are the great stretches of well-tended lawn.

Now, we're seeing "Large etchings of numbers signaling opposition to Trump appear on National Mall/A White House spokesman decried the numerals '86 47' marked into the grass near the World War II Memorial as an endorsement of political violence" (WaPo)(gift link).

White House spokesman Davis Ingle responded to a request for comment on the markings with an email. “Anyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible,” Ingle wrote. “They should also immediately seek psychiatric help to treat their severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has warped their brains and made them sick in the head.”

I just wrote, at the end of the previous post, "The more grim, puritanical, humorless, imperious, and repressive you are, the funnier it is to make fun of you." There's a similar concept at play here: The more you show how much you care about pristine beauty, the more exciting it becomes to besmirch it. We can't have nice things.

Oh, but those who endorse the idea "86 47" might respond, these "nice things" are not nice. They are Trump things and therefore the ugliest things of all. To desecrate them is to move in the direction of true beauty. 

Live feed of the filling of the Reflecting Pool.

Can we all just say it looks beautiful? Pick the answer closest to what you think.

Never. It looks like Trump. That's all I see and that's always ugly.

Let's be empathetic to those who are so deeply troubled by Trump that they can't see what is true.

It's objectively beautiful, and everyone ought to acknowledge what is true.

 

pollcode.com free polls

AND: I just made a tag for "Reflecting Pool" and added it to old posts in the archive. The oldest post is striking. It dates back to the Obama administration, September 26, 2012:

"About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged...."

".... according to a survey published Monday. Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to a survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report."

WaPo reports, in "Many Americans think Trump assassination attempts were fake, survey finds/About 1 in 4 say the correspondents’ dinner shooting was staged, the poll found, including roughly a third of Democrats, as conspiracy theories spread widely online."

Is it Trump's fault?

"Once an unseemly feature of the web’s fringes, deliberately ambiguous chatter about political violence has spread on mainstream platforms over the past year..."

"... most often in reference to Trump and Elon Musk, according to a new report from Know Your Meme, which tracks the rise of viral posts. 'Somebody should do it' and its online variants, the authors wrote, is wink-nudge shorthand for suggesting that somebody kill a powerful person. One of the earliest cases to go viral was a TikTok video from a Brooklyn comedian nebulously talking about 'all the Elon, Trump stuff.' Someone should 'throw their life away,' he said in the February 2025 post, and 'take one for the team.' The conservative Libs of TikTok reposted the clip. So did Musk, helping it rack up 48 million views.... Know Your Meme found that interest in the 'Somebody should do it' trend spiked after an armed man’s thwarted attack last month at the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington, where Trump was scheduled to speak...."

From "They’re not saying someone should kill Trump. But they’re coming close. 'Somebody should do it' and its variants have become increasingly popular online memes" (WaPo)(gift link).

The top-rated comment over there: "Trump has condoned threats, attempts, and actual murders of people he doesn't like, and his sycophants condemn any comment they say is aimed at him as TDS. No one should be calling for assassination of anyone; I prefer impeachment or the 25th amendment to get him out of office. Trump's own rhetoric has fueled the fire and perhaps he should stop calling for senators and others to be killed."

The RNC posted yesterday that "Democrats were told to be 'willing to get shot' to obstruct President Trump."

I do think this posting should say that this interview took place last July. Posting it relates to the shooting of Renee Good, but when Blitzer and Jeffries spoke, the incident had not yet occurred:

Democrats were told to be "willing to get shot" to obstruct President Trump, and instead of condemning it, they incited it further.

Democrats are held hostage by their violent and deranged far-left base.pic.twitter.com/Y3DQw2UG4z

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 8, 2026

Here's the Axios article Blitzer cites, "Democrats told to 'get shot' for the anti-Trump resistance" (published July 7, 2025). Excerpt:

"In a wide-ranging conversation with four Times reporters, President Trump talked about the Minneapolis ICE shooting, immigration, Venezuela and even his plans for further White House renovations."

I see "Trump Sits Down With Times Reporters for Two-Hour Interview," the headline in the NYT.

There's no substance, just an announcement:

The Times’s coverage of the president’s remarks will include stories, newsletters and videos over the coming days, as well as an episode of The Daily on Friday. A transcript of the interview will be published.

Very bold of Trump to give all that access — and right in the middle of a week packed with quickly unfolding action and with only the full transcript to protect him. I like that the Times is breaking out the material in separate bits.

The first bit is: "We Pressed Trump on His Conclusion About the ICE Shooting. Here’s What He Said. The exchange was a glimpse into the president’s reflexive defense of his federal crackdown on immigration." It could have been a much more reflexive defense of the ICE agents. His first take was balanced: "I want to see nobody get shot. I want to see nobody screaming and trying to run over policemen either." And later, he says: "She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over" — I would say that's a reflexive defense of the woman. How does he know she didn't try to run the agent over? 

Also, the NYT writes "When we pressed Mr. Trump on his conclusion that the victim, Renee Nicole Good, tried to run over the agent," but technically, the first quote is not a statement that she tried to run anyone over. It's a distanced, abstract statement: "I want to see nobody get shot. I want to see nobody screaming and trying to run over policemen either." I'm not seeing the follow-up question quoted, but I think it shouldn't have been "Why are you concluding that Good tried to run over the agent?" but "Are you saying you've determined that Good tried to run over the agent?" [Or better, to avoid ambiguity: "Are you saying you've determined that Good intended to run over the agent?"]

The second article based on the interview is "Trump Says U.S. Oversight of Venezuela Could Last for Years/In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, President Trump said 'only time will tell' when it comes to how long the United States aims to control the country" (NYT).

Trump accuses Rob Reiner of causing his own death through "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

Here's what Trump posted at Truth Social:

"A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!"

Reiner's son Nick has been arrested for the murders. Assuming Nick Reiner is indeed the murderer, he was certainly angry at his father, but it's absurd to think that the son's anger toward the father is about the father's recent political expression. 

Virtually everyone else has responded to the news of the murder with praise for Reiner's work as an actor and director and has chosen to leave politics for another day. Trump went to the complete opposite extreme, speaking not just about his political opposition to the man but blaming Reiner for his own death and making it all about Trump and larding his statement with self-praise — surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness! — to the point where many readers will wonder whether this is satire.

I mean, is it possible that Trump believes he is doing satire in honor of a great satirist?

"What is Demthink? It’s what you’d end up with if you trained a large language model solely on the inner monologue of people who..."

"... either work in Democratic politics or watch MSNBC for eight hours a day.... The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else."

Writes Nate Silver, purporting to read the collective mind of Democrats, in "Is America ready for a gay president? Kamala Harris and a subscriber have questions about Mayor Pete, and I have annoyingly nuanced answers."

I've already blogged about what Harris said in her book about not picking Pete for VP — here, 10 days ago — and I don't want to redo that. I'm blogging Silver's piece because of the idea of "Demthink" and I liked these examples of how wrong it can go:

"Trump’s federal takeover of Washington ends today, after a 30-day period.... For Trump, the job is done."

"The capital city is now safe, so he says, his experiment a runaway success. He proved it by driving a single block in his motorcade last night for a dinner at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, the ultra-traditional dining room on 15th and H. 'I wouldn’t have done this three months ago, four months ago,' Trump told the press pack outside. 'This was one of the most unsafe cities in the country. Now it’s as safe as there is.'... A group of women inside the restaurant filmed themselves shouting at the president — 'Free D.C., Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time' — and were swiftly ejected by the Secret Service. And the Google rating for poor old Joe’s is plummeting fast, thanks to a sudden and mysterious blitz of one-star reviews.... Trump and the GOP plan to keep hammering away hard on law and order, keeping the horrific murder of refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte front and center of their campaign...."

From the Politico "Playbook": "Donald dines out."

The dinner disrupters:

CODEPINK activists disrupted Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Rubio, and other cabinet members’ dinner.

They feast while Gaza starves.
Trump is the Hitler of our time.
Free DC. Free Palestine!
Stop terrorizing communities all over the world!! pic.twitter.com/dPLeWIwHLH

— CODEPINK (@codepink) September 10, 2025

Watch how Trump stands and smiles, taking the abuse for awhile, then waves his finger in a subtle get-'em-outta-here message. Seconds later, he flashes angry and orders "Come on, let's go." I imagine people around him learn to jump at the subtle gesture so they won't have to endure the swiftly approaching rage. All 3 stages are, I believe, political theater: 1. the patient smile, 2. the subtle finger wave, 3. The sharp, angry order. I don't think he was happy, then disapproving, then rageful. It's a routine and he's in control. That's where I place my bet.

"Trump is dying! He hasn’t been seen in 3 days!"/"*Spent 3 days examining security footage to see who damaged his limestone*"

Leftists: “Trump is dying! He hasn’t been seen in 3 days!”

Trump: *Spent 3 days examining security footage to see who damaged his limestone* pic.twitter.com/ylpKFAefE1

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) August 30, 2025

"Vice President JD Vance's... comments about being prepared to assume the presidency in case of a 'terrible tragedy' befalling President Trump set tongues wagging."

"The timing of these remarks drew attention within the political landscape as keyboard warriors started connecting dots to the prominent bruise on Trump's right hand that went viral.... The story has generated substantial engagement on social media platforms, particularly on X. Below are some tweets...."

From "'Trump is Dead' trends on X: J D Vance's remark over US president sparks frenzy; Simpsons prediction adds fuel" (Times of India).

"I am totally convinced that if Russia raised their hands and said, 'We give up, we concede, we surrender..."

"... we will GIVE Ukraine and the great United States of America, the most revered, respected, and powerful of all countries, EVER, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everything surrounding them for a thousand miles, the Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners would say that this was a bad and humiliating day for Donald J. Trump, one of the worst days in the history of our Country.' But that’s why they are the FAKE NEWS, and the badly failing Radical Left Democrats. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!"

Trump is on a roll on Truth Social this morning. That may be his best written work — most absurdly comic and yet too true — maybe ever.

"Have you noticed that trump is one of the very few presidents who does not have any kind of pet? I would sooner get rid of those folks than the cats and dogs. Absurd."

A comment on the NYT article, "We Love Our Dogs and Cats. But Are They Bad for the Environment? Some pets have wide-ranging effects on the planet. Here’s how to lessen them."

In the comments, everything always gets around to Trump. 

From the article: "Gregory Okin, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated in a 2017 study that the estimated 163 million cats and dogs in the United States consume a whopping quarter of the country’s animal-derived calories.

"Are you for real?"

I asked at the end of a post about an essay about social media, vacations, and self-knowledge, but it's the same question I want to ask about these videos Meade has been texting me this morning — this and this.

I texted back: "Is this real?" "Is this AI?"

I took my suspicious mind to Grok: "How can I detect AI video? I'm seeing things like [the above-linked videos]. I believe it is AI. It looks off, especially in the mouth. The person doesn't have a name and the person seems to be confidently spewing talking points. The person has attributes that seem chosen to boost credibility (often a nice-looking person of color saying something conservative)."

I know. If I hate AI, why am I using AI? Maybe AI is better at detecting AI than I am. A fight-fire-with-fire concept. It's different, at least. A second opinion.

Here's Grok's answer. It's not conclusive, but for both videos, it finds evidence that these are AI. I won't copy all that Grok had to offer. I'll just say watch the mouth. The lip shapes don't fully match the phonemes in the audio. And is the flow of language human? Catch yourself. You might like it because you think the person is articulate, but it's not human eloquence. Don't become the person who likes what is artificial.

I'm sounding the alarm. Please, we need to preserve our capacity to detect what is fake. But in the end, we are going to lose. I think we already know that, and I fear that many of us are already thinking that we prefer the fake, even if we can tell, maybe even especially when we can tell. 

What Joan Baez said about crashing her newly bought Tesla.

"Yes, I did. God was speaking to me, because I got this car—literally, I was trying it out. I drove for 45 minutes, I drove home—boom: I backed into a big tree and it was destroyed."

I read that in this Vanity Fair article: "Joan Baez Thinks Timothée Chalamet Was 'Too Clean' to Play Bob Dylan/The iconic musician opens up about her detachment from Dylan, her political engagement, and her real thoughts on A Complete Unknown."

I read that out loud and said: "That's a kind of corny old humor — something happens and you say 'God is punishing me' or something.'"

Meade said: "Well, she does have that song, 'I Believe in God.'"

The song is "God Is God" ("Yeah, I believe in God and God ain't me.... And I believe in God but God ain't us.... But I believe in God and God is God")(written by Steve Earle, who is, I think, the background singer).

"Screen time together is better than individual device time, experts say. Start playing multiplayer video games like Mario Kart on the same screen...."

"Pick a movie or TV show to watch together as a family, without checking a your phone. 'TV is underrated in the age of short form video, if you’re worried about their attention span,' says Devorah Heitner, author of 'Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.' 'It’s an opportunity to connect, and it’s also an opportunity to have a shared vocabulary.'"

From "The White House is worried about kids’ screen time. Here are five things parents can do. A new MAHA-led report on childhood health has harsh words about screen time, but the reality is more nuanced" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Did you ever think it would come to this, that the situation with children would get so bad that watching more TV would come to be regarded as therapeutic?!

That's a free access link, so you can see multiple other issues, such as the painful dissonance for parents who want to get their kids off the devices but hate to be on the same page with Trump and Bobby.

"If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is 'pagan.'"

"The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists because it gives them permission to grab whatever they want. This ethos encourages egotists to puff themselves up and boast in a way they find urgently satisfying; self-love is the only form of love they know...."

That's David Brooks, tending to your soul, in "How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact" (NYT)(free-access link).

I hadn't encountered that men-thinking-about-the-Roman-Empire meme in quite a while. Okay. Nice to see its return. Helps us understand what the men are doing these days.

Anyway, I wonder, is this analysis unfair to pagans?

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people....

Anything that feels rehumanizing?

Well, read the whole thing to be fair to Brooks, not that he's being fair to Trump... or to pagans. 

Looking into this blog's archive to see what I might have said about pagans over the years, I encountered this May 29, 2017 post, which focuses on a quote from Andrew Sullivan calling Trump "a pagan":