(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

All of those warning videos they showed us in grammar school were right. Socialism is a creeping menace. Just let a little into your society and pretty soon, everything's gone from soybeans to lobsters and to Moscow in a handbasket. From the New York Daily News:

So Maine’s iconic lobstermen are seeing red over being left out of Trump’s $16 billion bailout of “our wonderful farmers," the second giveaway aimed at cushioning them from the damage he caused with the tariffs. "What are we, chopped lobster?” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked the Washington Post after watching Trump’s press conference flanked by farmers who will benefit from the bailout. King is joining Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and the state’s two representatives in the House of Representatives to push a bill that would provide similar relief to lobster producers as well as some industry boosting goodies...

Lobster producers say they just want to claw back a slice of a once-promising market that has been all but wiped out by the tariff tit-for-tat. China bought $128 million worth of Maine lobsters in 2017. Maine Coast, a lobster wholesaler in the town of York says it’s lost 90% of business in China after the tariffs went into effect.

When the Mustache of Righteousness gets involved, things will move. I guarantee that. But this is yet another example of how the national economy is in the hands of people who believe only in enriching themselves. Everything else? They're winging it. Farmers getting killed by our policies? Throw them some money. Why them and not us, say the lobstermen. There is no good answer, of course because socialism is a conveyor belt to chaos. It's even worse when it's being exercised by accident on behalf of a president* who's just trying to toss as much money out the window of the getaway car as he can.

T.J. Pearson, left, and Phil Miles pack lobsters in a special insulated box at Maine Coast in York on Wednesday, January 30, 2019. Portland Press Herald Getty Images

This seems like a near thing, and I agree with the people who say that it wasn't aimed at El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, who's in the bag anyway, but at the US military generally. (Although stumbling into a shooting war with a country to which he's already indebted would be the Trumpiest thing to do.) However, one question for another day is why we still have a United States ship of war named after one of the great triumphs of the army of Treason in Defense of Slavery?

I have continued to follow with interest the least interesting political and ideological dispute of all time—namely, the pie-fight over who really is a conservative and what style of rhetoric aimed at discriminating against gay people and restricting women's rights would best serve The Cause. It is helpful to remember that the whole thing is the result of a guy's having been triggered by an event at a public library one entire continent away from where he works...which, by the way, is that bastion of moral and cultural respectability, the New York Post.

The whole thing continues to make me feel like Gulliver, suddenly finding himself in the middle of the war between Lilliput and Blefescu over the proper way to open an egg. From Dean Swift's original:

Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.

Or integralism. It's a toss-up, really.

Gulliver looks through the castle’s window in Lilliput Getty Images

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: The mighty, mighty 'OZ is going to be wall-to-wall Mac Rebenack all weekend to honor the passing of the man we first came to know as Dr. John, The Night Tripper, who came to embody the glory that was New Orleans music and the tradition of the great Crescentpiano players that began with Jelly Roll Morton and Willie (The Lion) Smith. Oddly, I came to Dr. John through the mystery of another artist.

One night, long ago, on WBCN, the famous "underground" radio station, I heard a mind-blowing single entitled "1862 B.P." by someone or something called Reverend Ether, The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory. I heard it once, that night. Try as I might, I couldn't find it again until the dawn of the Intertoobz.

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However, thanks to the great Ed Ward in Rolling Stone, who was as taken by the damn thing as I was, I got pointed toward New Orleans. With a little research, I discovered that the Reverend Ether was a New Orleans musician named Ronnie Barron, who made some records with a local musician/producer named Mac Rebenack. (For a time, they were billed as Grits 'n Gravy.) A few years later, Barron was offered a new character named Dr. John, The Night Tripper by his old running buddy. Barron turned it down. Rebenack took up the character instead and the rest is gris-gris immortality. I caught the Doctor's original show once—the voodoo lady singers, the smoke and fog, Dr. John dressed up like an evil Mardi Gras Indian. It freaked out a couple of people that I was with, but it made me a fan for life. The Doctor passed this week; hence the weekend tribute on 'OZ. Here are a couple of numbers that I've been enjoying in my own private tribute.

The original hoodoo anthem.

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The comeback hit single that greased up the airwaves good and proper.

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The famous movie clip.

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And here he is on Treme, being completely himself, because David Simon is almost as cool as he was.

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And here is his most conspicuous heir.

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Sail on, hoodoo king. Sail on. And, yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Continuing with our theme, here are the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at Mardi Gras in 1958. The former Mrs. Simpson gets plunked with some beads and she didn't even have to do anything to get them, thank the Lord. History is so cool.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, National Geographic? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

It took decades of struggling with the weather on a small, desolate island off the Antarctic Peninsula. But now, scientists have finally unearthed the heaviest known elasmosaur, an ancient aquatic reptile that swam the seas of the Cretaceous period alongside the dinosaurs. The animal would have weighed as much as 15 tons, and it is now one of the most complete ancient reptile fossils ever discovered in Antarctica. Elasmosaurs make up a family of the plesiosaurs, which represent some of the largest sea creatures of the Cretaceous. Plesiosaurs generally look a little like large manatees with giraffe necks and snake-like heads, though they have four flippers rather than a manatee’s three.

If you spend decades in freaking Antarctica digging out a single fossil, there is only one logical reason. It is because dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee has determined that Top Commenter Kurt Weldon has spent far too much time watching Harry and the Hendersons, but that he is worthy of 61.11 Beckhams for being Top Commenter of the Week.

Okay, but here's the thing... If there IS a Bigfoot, he's gotta look a damn sight better in formal wear than You-Know-Who...

As the kidz say, truth.

I'm off to Ioway to get into this campaign trail business for real and, probably, to eat some incredibly unhealthy roadside food. Dispatches will be forthcoming this weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and walk on guilded splinters whenever possible, cher.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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