TrumpmenBashi The Great

Art by Gary Taxali / Garytaxali.com

Hello. Just a very brief post today.

Yesterday and today, we learned four idiotic things from the news.

1. Google’s honchos have joined the parade of Trump-fawning suck-ups. The company has actually agreed to rename “The Gulf of Mexico” “The Gulf of America” in GoogleMaps that are sent out to people in the U.S..

2. GoogleMaps will also rename “Mount Denali” as “Mount McKinley.” This is technically legit — under Trump’s orders, the Department of Interior officially made the change — but wildly inappropriate. The original name change from McKinley to Denali had been requested in 1975 by the Alaskan state government in honor of the indigenous Athabascan tribe that first settled in the area. (“Denali” was their word; it means “the high one.”) Most modern Alaskans of all ethnic backgrounds generally despise the idea of restoring the name honoring William McKinley — a president who was both porky of build and addicted to ruinously high tariffs — inasmuch asMcKinley never once visited Alaska or had any connection to the mountain. All he did to deserve naming rights was to get shot to death by a guy protesting oligarchs.

3. Republican lawmakers have introduced bills to rename “Dulles International Airport“ “Trump International Airport.”

4. A FOX News panel “gushed” at the idea of adding Trump to Mount Rushmore. Back in 2020, Trump had proposed this idea himself. He proposed it to then-South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, years before she became his secretary of homeland security. Having not yet become a toady beholden to him, she was quoted at the time thus: “I shook his hand, and I said, ‘Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.’ And he goes, ‘Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’. I started laughing. He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.”

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   Comically egomaniacal actions by despots are nothing new, of course. The cheesiest and weirdest example of this is probably Turkmenbashi The Great, ruler of Turkmenistan. Turkmenbashi ordered that applicants for drivers licenses be quizzed on details of a book he wrote; banished dogs from the capital city because he didn’t like how they smelled; declared the second Sunday of August “melon day,” because he liked melons; abolished the Turkmen word for bread and replaced it with Gurbansoltan, his mother's name; and ordered that each news broadcast begin with a pledge that the talking heads’ tongues would shrivel if they slandered the president.

   Crazy, right? Just wait. We’ve got four years ahead of us.

   —

   We are in the final round of the Gene Pool’s first World Series, about your preferences in “ethnic” food. It is now late in the playoffs, and we are down to … two finalists. But there is a major last-minute twist. It may strike you as spectacularly dishonest, like the 1919 World Series, or it may seem remarkably noble and decent and humble, like Lou Gehrig’s farewell.

At this point we were supposed to be down to the two highest vote-getters, but this proved preposterous and unworkable, because “Italian” so far outstripped the others that a final playoff became pointless. Yet still, there is another candidate, a worthy one I had accidentally omitted from consideration right from the gecko.

So today we have the finals, featuring “Italian” and a last-minute ringer. Will there be an upset as dramatic as the time the 1969 Mets beat the Orioles?

Okay, we are good to go.

Lastly, I recommend that you consider upgrading your subscription to “paid,” on purely mathematical cost-benefit analysis. Bear with me here: The Gene Pool costs $4.15 a month, which always worked out to 32 cents per post. But that was months ago, when I average three posts a week. I now average five posts a week. This means you are only paying 21 cents per post! How can you turn this down??

See you on Thursday, with the Invitational.