Hello, and welcome to another week of wackiness in the land of alternate realities. I was pretty happy to have moved into this last seven days when I could give the refresh app on my news sites a rest from checking election results like I was a day trader. And while last Saturday morning offered up a very welcome result, it also brought a piece of comedy gold that was so absurd it became the very definition of the old saying “comedy is tragedy plus time.” Whoever it was who actually said that first, very much got it right when it came to Rudy Giuliani and his minions of manic muckfuckers. Behold the stand-up routine, er, press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping last Saturday morning.

Zack Bornstein wrote on Twitter, “I could write jokes for 800 years and I’d never think of something funnier than Trump booking the Four Seasons for his big presser, and it turning out to be the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot between a dildo store and a crematorium.” Oh, and it was also revealed that the first person called to the podium was Daryl Brooks, a political gadfly and convicted sex offender from New Jersey. Plus, the election results were called for Joe Biden while Giuliani was speaking (please watch the 1 minute clip. It’s classic tragedy+comedy). Ok, that is all.

But wait. People, I can’t seem to stop here: There was the brilliant follow-up by Four Seasons Total Landscaping to market and sell t-shirts reading “Make America Rake Again” and “Lawn and Order” (they sell masks with those quips too, so you know they’re on the right side of the COVID debate). Santa and his elves will be very busy delivering those for a 2020 Christmas haul. So, truly, that’s all I have about that right now.

Alright, maybe one more thing: the sense that to watch Giuliani spin so close to the edge of sanity on that clip is to wonder about when a situation does cross a line into comedy and when it just stays sad. Obviously that depends on the person watching. I’m usually someone who is really uncomfortable watching people lose—except for last week when I was beyond gleeful about Trump losing, which has as much to do with his streak of mean as with my relief that we don’t have to live with his damaging, dangerous incompetence for four more years. But when it comes to things like sports, spelling bees, bake-offs, that kind of thing, I get squirmy with sadness for the people not winning. Possibly being an only child means I didn’t really strengthen the whole competitive muscle that gets exercised with siblings. But yet, the actuality that almost half the country pretty much lost and that they do not believe the same things I do on a fairly consistent level is jarring, is it not? This is more than a winner/loser situation. This is an I’m right/you’re wrong ideology that over 70 million humans in the US seem to be hewing toward—and this number counts for whatever side of the divide you stand on.

My friend Windy shared a podcast Why Is This Happening where the host Chris Hayes talks to Vox writer David Roberts about the partisan divide. It’s a really good listen and the analogy that it’s as if the Left and the Right got a divorce and the Left ended up with custody of the facts is truly interesting. Chris actually says it best: “…everyone’s got confirmation bias, … we’re all doing that. But in the divorce, one side got the actual institutions that do a pretty good job of producing knowledge, and the other side didn’t get any of them.” To which David adds, “Yes, and the right created a sort of simulacrum of it that sort of apes the gestures and the tone. If you look at the stuff coming out of right-wing think tanks, it looks and even sort of sounds like actual inquiry, but it’s not the same thing. It’s like you’re acting it out without the spirit of it.” Then—and to me most indicative of now—Chris delivers the zinger: “I think it’s important for people to recognize, … that a professor on my show making some point about their social science research sounds to someone on the other side of this epistemic divide the way that Pat Robertson spouting off sounds to me. It’s just like, ‘Yeah, I’m not buying it. You’re Pat Robertson.'” Which is then summed up: David: “Right, and they’ve been trained now to offer zero deference anymore. The fact that it’s a professor, an ostensible expert who’s ostensibly done research, just carries no weight at all on the right at all anymore. Zero. So the only criteria by which they are judging what that professor is saying is, ‘Is this congenial to my identity? To my priors?’ That’s the only sort of epistemic criteria left, and it’s not even really epistemic.”

Whew, that in a nutshell is a lot of stubborn to hold onto. So what is to come? For the most part, I do love me some comedy, and often do find it’s good to laugh to keep from crying, but I don’t know how much more of that is going to happen before we need to get on with it. As we sail off into the next, I do think that there’s a course corrective into some smoother political waters that will be much more serious. And I don’t take for granted it will be choppy for a good little while. I hope some of the intense hand-wringing (we’ll never get anything done. we all can’t get along. whatever are we going to do?) will be settled as the new administration takes office. Obviously time will tell. I know I’ve learned to be a hulluva lot more alert to getting involved and doing what I can to keep things rolling decently. So away we go. And in the meantime, banana peels.