Take the Ride

I just finished Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me. It’s got dowager devouring Burmese pythons, Angie the smart, self-assured wild animal removal specialist, a bevy of secret service agents and the bat-shit residents and guests of Casa Bellicosa (AKA The Former Guy’s Palm Beach home).

Also Skink. Hilarity and justice, ultimately, ensue.

Hiaasen’s insane portrait of Mastodon is a shudder inducing beauty (Mastodon is the secret service name for the barely fictionalized reality-show disaster ex-prez). The author goes much easier on the first lady though (secret service name Mockingbird–heh). Why? She's as much of a hateful grifter as the shit she's married to.
In the middle of reading this close-to -real portrayal of the shit-show that just won’t go away, we all watched Don’t Look Up. In it Meryl Streep does a brill and disturbing turn as a trim, female Treasonweasel (with significantly better tailoring). Some poor bastard who has the misfortune to look like Chris Christie, plays her Chief of Staff.

Like Squeeze Me, Don’t Look Up is more than an indictment of the former administration’s greedbrained, entitled rich fuck, repeat-a-lie-often-enough-it-becomes-the-truth mentality. The movie nails the media’s general vapidity as well the oh-look-shiny-object attention span which so many of us rock.

It’s a miracle humanity has survived as long as it has.