Month: July 2026

I took the dog for a late walk this evening around 10, and listened to the array of explosions all around. They were coming from six or eight unique locations, a couple of bangs at a time from one direction followed by half a minute’s silence and then a couple from somewhere else. At one point, I heard the distinctive, rhythmic pop-pop-pop-pop of a semiautomatic rifle (living in the country, you learn what that is just like you can hear the difference between a gasoline and a diesel truck). Twenty bullets spent in eight seconds, and god help whoever’s down-range.

Nothing collective. Nothing aesthetic. Just a bunch of isolated folks winding down their thirty-racks of Coors Light by participating in our national pastime of blowing things up.

It was a fitting conclusion to a week of collapse at the Great American State Fair, a birthday festival in which nothing worked, classical architecture made of canvas fluttered against its metal-pipe frame, scaffolding fell down behind the performers, and there was a lot more grass than there were people standing on it. The neo-Nazis put on the best-organized parade in DC.

After 45 years of letting the wealthy strip all the rivets and brackets and fittings that hold the nation together, it can’t come as much of a surprise when one particularly gifted dumbass gives it a shove and the whole thing collapses. That sound you’re hearing may not be fireworks at all; it might be the last structural members giving way.