39 Comments
Jul 26, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

"Fugitive Richard Nixon Dies in Shootout With Police"

The Onion--always there before any of us!

Expand full comment

Speaking of which, everything about this story looks like it was lifted right from the Onion:

A Louisiana man hospitalized with COVID-19 told CBS he still wouldn't get vaccinated.

Scott Roe said he didn't regret not getting the vaccine and would rather be hospitalized than get it.

"I would have gone through this, yes sir," Roe, who said he's a Republican, told CBS News' David Begnaud. "Don't shove it down my throat. That's what local, state, federal administration is trying to do — shove it down your throat."

When Begnaud asked what was being shoved, Roe said, "Their agenda is to get you vaccinated."

https://www.businessinsider.com/louisiana-man-hospitalized-with-covid-says-he-rather-sick-vaccinated-2021-7

Expand full comment

"Better intubation than indoctrination"

Expand full comment

Maybe he can get a job, if he survives, as a sideshow freak. Aka a Republican Congressperson. Honestly it is hard to understand these people who make the whole world jump through hoops (e.g., state rollouts only! no federal plan!) and risk their own actual death -- for only the most obscure possible principle. Like, buddy, sure, you're the hero. You are the Okefenokee Thomas More.

Expand full comment

Anyone who uses "They're shoving this down my throat!" as a metaphor has never actually had anything shoved down their throat.

Expand full comment

I read somewhere that "They're shoving this down my throat!" is linked to homophobia. Weird how that stuff works. I used to use "Leeches SUCK!" in a youth environmental presentation, until a teacher's aid protested that it was not appropriate. I had no idea what she was talking about, until I later learned "you suck!" leaves out the crucial part of the original insult "you suck cock". I don't use that expression any more...

Expand full comment
Jul 26, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Sometimes I get to thinking we live in the stupidest time line.

Then I imagine the world where Goldwater won.

Expand full comment
Jul 26, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Black people would have been forcibly moved to waterless, desert "homelands" in the American Southwest. If all of them didn't make it, (shrug)

Expand full comment

Only got delayed a few decades. We've been in it for decades.

Expand full comment
Jul 26, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Ah, the good old days before everyone “did their own research” and considered themselves their own “expert.”

Expand full comment

Remember that the Birchers were actually telling people back then not to take the "Jewish vaccine" that was part of the One World Government conspiracy.

Expand full comment

Of course but they didn't have the reach of Fox and Facebook etc.

Expand full comment

White folks are sure riled up about things these days. .Never hear much about "white unrest" though.

"The island’s slot machines are airlifted to Monte Carlo."

That's a great sentence!

I bet if we included say, a five pack of oxycontin with each vaccine we lick most of this " anti-vax bullshit in a couple of weeks. JD's people would be coming down out of the hollers by the pick-up load to get a shot. They'd be getting it every other week. Some every other day if they could! Put them in blister packs.Makes it easier to crush them up without losing any powder.

So I'm told.

Expand full comment

Sublime

Expand full comment

Dunno why, but this cracked me up:

"The island’s slot machines are airlifted to Monte Carlo."

But I must be a whiner here and criticize this piece. Why put so much energy in a lulz-filled alt-history when the underlying reality is pretty much happening with worse likely to come. (Fairness requirement: Tennessee backed down from their broad anti-vax idiocy. Til, I suppose, next time.)

Or maybe I failed to get the joke. It's, like, a meditation on what could have happened if things were then like they are now (or will be real soon). I don't know...

Expand full comment

In real life they were air lifted to Las Vegas. and TN backed down except on Covid, I believe

Expand full comment

However much Tennessee backtracked, an anti-vaccine precedent now exists. TBH, rational albeit weak arguments can be made against Covid vaccines but at this point to start opposing all other, long established vaccines — well, this is why I consider a lot of Republicans pathologically insane.

Expand full comment

In Roy's completely credible alt-history, Nixon ends up shooting JFK. Since we're living through what seems to be a bizarre alt-history as it is, who's going to get offed by whom a few years from now? My guess, Barron Trump whacks Alec Baldwin, in the clubhouse, with a nine-iron.

(PS Thanks for the great link to the NIH info on the Cutter Labs debacle.)

Expand full comment

I think you've innovated a genre. Alternative Factual Science History. My favorite quote: “It’s plain as day these same skull-cap scientists who invented the drugs that make our children into hop-heads and the social theories that cause Negro unrest in our cities are now killing our children,” Senator Ronson was, of course, the great uncle of Mark Ronson. Uptown funk you up, Mallory Tepper Gruen.

Expand full comment

I had a third-grade teacher, in my bilingual curriculum once available in Colorado public schools, proudly wax rhapsodic about her college-dauys advocacy for Barry Goldwater (=piss). Fast forward 15 years later: she emerges as one of the most strident advocates for the "English Only" referendum on the state ballot.

Fascists don't get better. They go into dormancy like cicadas or fungus.

Expand full comment

Years ago a chiropractor I was seeing about an injury (guess who had no insurance for a real doctor) told me the polio vaccine does not prevent polio. Last time I saw a chiropractor.

Expand full comment

A disproportionately high number of chiropractors seem to be quacks, tax cheats, and conspiracy theorists. Oh, but they demand to be called “Doctor of Chiropractic” [sic].

Expand full comment

They do love to think chiropractic manipulation cures all ills

Expand full comment

Luv 2 be “Doctor of [adjective]”

Expand full comment

my [adjective] is philosophy

Expand full comment

I'm a Doctor of Chirographics

Expand full comment

I’m a Doctor of Phrenologic.

Expand full comment

Also, they wanted "Chiropractix" but forgot how to spell it

Expand full comment

So we all get sick and die. A fitting end for a stupid species.

Expand full comment

I don't believe in gods or such but if I did I'd curse the motherfucker(s) for placing me on such a dumb planet.

Expand full comment

The planet's fine and will outlive. We're what's stupid in the world, the fruit of the Enlightenment and western civilization maybe being the worst.

Expand full comment

Yeah, that's what I meant. Thanks.

Expand full comment

Trivia: Herb Caen invented 'beatnik' in 1958—in our timeline.

In the late 1950s if you were a Jew looking for an house in La Jolla, Ca. (renamed 'Tuckergrad' in 2030) (basically San Diego's Grosse Pointe) your realtor put a green card in the windshield of his car to let the realtor or seller at the house in which you were interested know to tell you that the house were suddenly off the market. Then one day the City Fathers came by the realtors' club and said "We want U.C.S.D. to get a medical school and Dr Salk to open his Institute here, so lay off.' and most of them did. (I gather this is similar to a lot of stories from Atlanta, 'The city too busy [making money] to hate.'.)

Expand full comment

When I went to Georgia Tech back in the late '70s, I was astonished to find Lester Maddox Realty still doing a brisk (redlined) business. I don't know if he gave you a free pick handle with every closing.

Expand full comment

This piece will be quoted verbatim by Qanonnuts in 24 hours. Vol.1

Expand full comment

Yep, just like when Jon Schwarz tried to make up lies about destroying Trump ballots that were too ridiculous for even Trump supporters to believe. It was impossible.

https://theintercept.com/2021/07/21/election-fraud-trump-preposterous/

Expand full comment

Yay! love it, bravo. Second season: WHIPLASH: The London blitz. Constitutional part-hardiers refuse to turn off the lights or close the curtains, and their neighbors lynch them and hang them from lamposts, London survives, and the war is won. It's only a couple episodes and won't air in America but all the EU embraces it as an antidote to Brexit.

Expand full comment

The stupidest kind of conspiracy thinking, if two or more people are saying the same thing, they must be "conspiring." Both NASA and my third-grade science teacher told me the Earth is a sphere, they must have met in secret to get their stories straight, obviously in the pay of the Replogle crime family.

Expand full comment