Peter Baker crawls out from under his rock

 Vacay is over. Trieste, I must tell you all about Trieste!

But then there is coming back to this period of absolute shittiness. I'm nominating absolute shittiness as the name for whatever this is. It is not post anything, it is what comes out of your post-erior.

I've been re-reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, a genius novel from the era of genius American novels, the 1970s. The book is narrated, in part, by Richard Nixon, and tells of his ardor for Ethal Rosenberg as she is about to be electrocuted in Times Square. One of the bits that I really love is that Time Magazine is the national poet laureate of these here states, and so Time articles about the Red Menace and American Democracy and Our Boys In Korea are spaced out as poems on the page.

In the absolutely shit war at present, the NYT has thrown itself into the role of poet laureate. The NYT sees that underneath it all, America is just a democracy supporting country. And shucks, so well intentioned! In a thumbsucker by one of the NYT's heteronyms, Peter Baker (of course! they have developed this persona well, from Bush asskisser to Trump apologist - a fiction worthy of Pessoa!), we read these heartfelt lines in the elegy entitled: Wars Often Lose Public Support/Over Time.

Trump Started This

One

Without Much

we read: "Even some Americans sympathetic to the goal of toppling the repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Tehran find it difficult to embrace Mr. Trump as commander in chief." Really, the "repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Teheran" reaches the pathos of TIMES poems in the 1950s about the glorious trial of the Rosenbergs:

it

was a

sickening and

to americans almost

incredible history of men

so fanatical that they would destroy

their own countries & col

leagues to serve a

treacherous

utopi

a.

The Peter Baker heteronym has been in this business for years. Who can forget the odes to George Bush, a man of superhuman strength and vision? Which were wrapped up, in the end, by Baker's great 2013 Epic, "THE FINAL HEARTFELT CONFLICT THAT ENDED THE BUSH-CHENEY PARTNERSHIP, which has been compared to Dumas's classic Three

Muskateers, except there were two of them.

“Not since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger// had two Americans in public office collaborated with such lasting effect as/ George Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks/

they confidenty steered America through its most traumatic years since Vietnam/ erecting a nationa-security apparatus that their successors have largely adopted and prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that/ members of the administration take pains to emphasize, toppled two brutal regimes.”

The Peter Baker heteronym is obviously representative of NYT's approach to all problems abroad, mainly caused by people abroad being abroad, and thus not being Americans and tending towards brutality and terrorist-support, unless we bomb the shit out of them, kill their kids, and point out such models of amity and freedom-lovin' as our allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And here we are again!