Saturday, November 01, 2025

You can think more about how & why not everyone has the privilege of entertaining your specific sense of humor, maybe?

"The rhetoric justifying their presence and exonerating their violence is loud and unoriginal"

Lauren Michele Jackson

"Chicago, ICE, and the Lie of the American Pastoral"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/chicago-ice-and-the-lie-of-the-american-pastoral

"Trump, in September, posted an image to social media casting himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the avatar of sanctioned bloodlust from Francis Ford Coppola’s 'Apocalypse Now.' In the accompanying text, Trump had altered Kilgore’s famous line—'I love the smell of napalm in the morning'—to suit his fantasy, replacing 'napalm' with 'deportations.' (He also supplied a new theatrical title: 'Chipocalypse Now.') The shoddy edit shows a fleet of Huey helicopters flying past the unmistakable skyline; the sky, meanwhile, is yellowed by explosions. This is Chicago as your average Fox viewer, including millions who live beyond the city’s limits in what Illinoisans call Chicagoland, imagines it—our lake as a lake of fire."

Lauren Michele Jackson 

"Chicago, ICE, and the Lie of the American Pastoral"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/chicago-ice-and-the-lie-of-the-american-pastoral

As late summer saw the White House further embellish its pretext for invading Chicago, a cheeky homegrown joke was making the rounds online. Those on the ground shared visual dispatches from the city’s 'killing fields': the greenery of Lincoln Park, captioned 'Chaos & Anarchy'; the lake’s turquoise-meets-cerulean horizon as seen from the 'war-torn' city’s eighteen and a half miles of waterfront trail. Short videos laid the President’s sound bites over montages filled with boat parties and outdoor concerts and drone shot after drone shot of the handsome skyline. Illinois’s governor, J. B. Pritzker, got in on the gag, 'reporting from war-torn Chicago' wearing army-green body armor in a segment that aired on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' 'As you can see, there’s utter mayhem and chaos on the ground,' Pritzker shouts from the heart of downtown, as people go about their business on the La Salle Street bridge behind him.

Lauren Michele Jackson

"Chicago, ICE, and the Lie of the American Pastoral"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/chicago-ice-and-the-lie-of-the-american-pastoral

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