Introduction to Misfit 35

“If they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I shouldn’t get the blame.”
Donald Trump on his endorsed candidates

Once again, The Orange Nightmare proved conclusively, he is the world’s biggest loser. Not that he will accept the obvious; his brand is dead (as Mark Cuban predicted it would be within five years, back when Trumpty Dumpty announced). Politically, he should be too; he, and his diehard gang if uglies, just haven’t recognized that fact yet. Oh yeah, I forgot; facts don’t count anymore.

At this point, an almost inevitable indictment, might actually be good for his brand as it will give him something to fulminate about. The “injustice of it all” would keep him whining, like the spoiled child he is, on the front pages of the print and social media. Talk show blather brains will pick up the mantle and smear crap and on all the screens that will have them.  I’m not sure how he can spin militias spontaneously activating themselves (after an indictment) and reacting in crazy and seditious ways will advance the cause, but he’s tried it before and more or less got away with it. The only way to take him down, like the bully he is, is to challenge him and he will back down. Appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t have to look very far into the past to see how appeasement failed, in an epically disastrous, way in Europe.   

So now he sits, considering his “big-announcement” in his mar a loco sub-basement with his remaining stolen documents, determined to forge onward, ignoring the advice of rational actors in his camp to wait. (might be the only way to stay out of jail at this point; to be re-elected. Fat chance that.) Waiting is not his strong point. Oh, and I forgot; rationality doesn’t count either. Many of us are counting on him to announce and do for Herschel, “brain damaged former footballer,” Walker, what he did for Loeffler and Purdue in Georgia. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that the red wave turned into a ripple. At least, after this election, there is some hope for the near future, without an autocratic leader and all the repressive government edicts that go with it. And we know who to thank for the historic tanking his “party” took. Enough politics.

And on to poetry. We have another killer issue, I think.  I urge everyone to pay special attention to D.E. Steward’s Guest Editorial piece and his piece about Ukraine. Note the date when that was written.  Consider buying one or two, if not all, of his series of amazing Chroma books, from which that poem was taken. On a lighter note, we have Charles Rammelkamp’s poems on strippers, a very under-rated, national public resource, profession.  We have poems from some of my personal favorite original thinkers: Juliet Cook, David Giannini, and Mark Young just to mention a few. As usual we have poets from overseas as Rose Mary Boehm, Brenton Booth and Young.  I have an essay that channels the movie Network which has an eerie resonance in today’s world. Plus, our usual features including the original art from Gene McCormick.

With this issue, the aforementioned McCormick, is retiring from his position as in-house artist after nearly ten years of self-less dedication to interpreting the work that graced our pages. He says that he will still be available for cover Art. May your Dayton Flyers soar to the top of the college hoop polls and may the White Sox recover after a down year.  Thank you. And, last, but by no means least, quite the opposite actually, thank you to Jennifer Lagier, our web-mistress extraordinaire, without whom none of this would be possible.