Who’s zooming who?
There are two parts to this thing that happened, or didn’t, last night.
The first is that Zoomers pranked the Diaper Don into thinking he had a million requests for tickets for his Tulsa rally, most of which actually came from people with no intention of attending his party.
Best part is that by keeping it over on Tik-Tok and K-Pop, they maintained their secrecy and I don’t think many people over 30 had an idea this was going on.
The other factor is that overselling the rally may have caused the Trump Campaign some unmerited bragging and time creating useless email lists, plus the erection of a separate stage for the non-existent overflow.
But it didn’t prevent anyone from attending. They still could have come.
Tulsa’s BOK arena holds 19,199 people. Last night it only needed to hold about 6,100.
It’s not like he’d planned a rally in Stillwater, where Oklahoma State’s Boone Pickens Stadium (named for a hedge-fund speculator) holds 55,509 or in Norman, where the Gaylord Family Stadium (named for rightwing newspaper owners) holds 80,126.
So I dunno why they picked Tulsa — maybe Gene Pitney fans, probably not Neil Young fans — but at least they didn’t overreach.
As much as they might have.
Much as the Zoomers pranked Trump, they also pranked the poor Trumpanzees who camped out 48 hours in advance to be part of a two-thirds empty venue.
As P!nk noted, filling the BOK Arena isn’t impossible and isn’t even all that hard. And you’d have gotten more entertainment at one of her concerts than by watching a dotard drink one-handed.
Indeed she does.
Meanwhile, here’s our
Juxtaposition of the Day
Zyglis here represents all sorts of American cartoonists who didn’t have David Rowe’s advantage of living a day away. A good job of commenting on something that never happened.
Rowe can describe what did happen instead of what might have, and that expanse of blue seats shows that he was actually watching this ridiculous failure unfold.
I continue to be surprised and horrified at the cultural hegemony that brings so much of our droppings to TV in other countries, but this does remind me of a delightful period when I was regularly working with Marina “Rinacat” Tay in Malaysia.
Because of the 12 hour time difference, I could email a critique, comment or request and, if I sent it early in the morning, she’d get it in the evening and vice-versa.
Three hours is disruptive but 12 hours was quite doable and we’d often go back-and-forth in real time.
As said, here it gives Rowe an enviable advantage. (Pedant note: Yes, 14 hours, not 12.)
Rowe mocks the notion of the “Silent Majority,” but there’s a serious takeaway to this pratfall, because people pile off a bandwagon when it no longer seems full and fun. This isn’t just an embarrassment but a significant setback for Dear Leader’s campaign.
The Deplorables will continue to believe, but they’re not enough.
In other news
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal hits on one of my bêtes noires, which is the constant attempt to tie the vagaries of the stock market into daily news.
The market itself is a sort of fraud, not so much through intentional dishonesty as public ignorance: It doesn’t mean half so much as we think it means, but, since we all think it does, it does.
And as long as we’re so eager to share in the delusion, Wall Street would be foolish not to simply rake in the cash and keep their mouths shut.
Small investors play the market as if it were a crap game, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose, but the people who really make money (A) play for much bigger stakes and, more important, (B) know the difference between what a company is worth and what it is valued at.
“Valued at” being a shared opinion with little rational basis, but that’s what moves the market and reporters are always eager to assign a cause to something that often has none.
The good thing for them being that, since there’s no actual connection, they don’t have to worry about being proven wrong.
And, on a related topic, Jen Sorensen lays out the story of a real panic over a fictional group.
Klamath Falls, Oregon, became the center of a panic after a kid posted a bogus Facebook notice announcing that busloads of Antifa thugs were coming to raise hell. On the Media has the story, but Sorensen pretty well wraps it up.
There’s no group called “Antifa.” Still, anybody who wants to put on black clothes and smash things can claim to be Antifa.
David From — who has a new book out — addressed Antifa the other day by quoting Lenny Bruce’s estimate that the Communist Party in America, back in J. Edgar Hoover’s day, consisted of “500 FBI agents and Gus Hall.”
Plus ca change.
And Stephen Collins notes another type of panic, to which I can only add that, in these troubled times, I wonder what the hell is wrong with some people.
Stay safe.
And, finally, Wallace the Brave touches on one of my few remaining irrational nightmares.
As noted the other day, I’ve long since stopped having the Student Dream — taking an exam for a course you’ve never attended — or the Actor’s Dream — going on stage without having been to rehearsal.
But I still get a dream from time to time in which it’s the end of school and I have to clean out my locker, only I stopped using it months ago and have not only forgotten my combination but even my locker number.
I think I’d quit having the dream on the basis of “Getting in Trouble,” since I don’t care about that anymore, but, in the dream, there are unspecified things in the locker that I want, so I have some anxiety about finding it and retrieving them.
Is there a little piece in the corner of your locker that you can’t quite get?
I know there is in mine.
Love that bit from Beyond the Fringe.
I used it as my monologue in Speech class, memorizing it off my parents’ 33 rpm LP.
Up and up and up, higher and higher and higher.
Remember: Nickleback sold out that place.
Twice.
I’ve had the School Dream enough times that when I find myself back in school, whether or not I actually know it’s a dream (50-50), I at least know that it’s of no consequence. My clothes are gone? Big deal. They’ll be back later. I can probably just fly out of this, anyway.
I work as a school custodian and can attest to truth in cartoon form. Many student gardens are left behind for us every year. And scientific advancements concerning new and unusual life forms are a regular occurrence.
In reference to your locker dream, my grandsons dreams are scarred for life. Due to Covid-19, he has two city library books in his fourth grade “cubby hole” that he stresses about every day. Attempts to get them are useless.