THE PHILIPPIC

MAKING SENSE OF THE SENSLESS SINCE 2004

  • Mitch McConnell: Master of the Obvious

    In two years, a great iterator of the evident will retire from the United States Senate. He was a man who stood for undeniable truth. A man who destroyed the separation of church and state by stacking the federal courts with right-wing Christian conservatives. A man who upheld the Constitution by allowing a fascist demagogue…

  • Zuckerbucks Says Later Days to the Facts

    During the 2016 election, a Buzzfeed News analysis found that “fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.” This, no doubt, is what inspired President Klump to proclaim that his alt-reality show should only present “alternative facts.” It also explains why Klump, after…

  • Fascism: How We Stepped in It

    You know the joke about the three guys who encounter dog shit? They smell it, touch it, taste it, confirm that it’s dog shit and walk away glad that they didn’t step in it. America’s gradual acceptance of fascism reminds me of that joke, only it differs in this respect: after we saw, touched, tasted…

  • The Children of Antimatter

    Adults pissing away their mortal minutes in idle distraction is fine. But children subjecting themselves to a constant stream of idiotic nonsense is downright obscene. In the not so distant past, stimulating a release of endorphins to the detriment or exclusion of other aspects of life was exclusively the domain of the grownup and it…

  • The Dystopia Files: Brave New World

    Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And whether the causes of the failure are out of our control (as in disease, war, poverty, disaster and death) or…

  • The Dystopia Files: Nineteen Eighty-Four

    More than any other dystopia, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four concentrates on its hero’s psychological state and his efforts to reveal the truth of the superstate in which he lives. Orwell’s meticulous attention to the engineering of reality and the digesting of the individual into the political entity makes this the definitive dystopia of post-Stalinist authoritarian…