America’s destruction of its own government and economy continues to shock the world outside of bribe-paying oligarchs. Not just Canada and Mexico but our allies across Europe and Asia look on with horror as Donald Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol thugs beat up and kidnap people on American streets and murder Venezuelan fishermen in the Caribbean. While a federal shutdown dragged on for almost two months, the MAGA-aligned Supreme Court gave a thumbs-up to Trump denying children SNAP benefits and Trump’s clown cabinet made the TV news rounds saying that inflation was a hoax and that prices were actually coming down.

Official government websites now function like backed-up sewers, filled with Trump Administration propaganda and lies about political enemies, the state of economy, and the safety of cities and communities. The Homeland Security site, in particular, engages in performative immaturity that would get you fired from any company in America. Its vulgar “messaging” mirrors whatever foreign-bot-generated AI content Trump shares on Truth Social. All of this contributes to the global impression that the word of the United States cannot be trusted.

For years I’ve taken a route that runs along Cayuga Lake when I visit relatives on another of New York’s Finger Lakes. On the drive there, I reach this stretch just north of Ithaca around noon, and on a sunny day it’s a beautiful 20-minute drive. On the return trip, though, I hit Route 89 early in the morning, when the hilly road glistens with dew and deer.

Most times you see them in adjacent fields, in groups of three and four, always in perfect Christmas card formation, a little mist for effect. Slowing down usually triggers their game of Red Light Green Light 1-2-3, where they scuffle slightly ahead and suddenly stop, bolt briefly and stop again, more of the scuffle-and-bolt until they finally clear the road. You wonder why you didn’t “Seek Alt Route,” like the yellow signs warn when men in lifts are chain-sawing tree limbs. Why did I think it so important to save 20 minutes by going this way and not another?

In America, a lot of the discord on the Israel-Hamas War and the complex and frustrating history of Palestinian statehood stems from the need for a villain.

It’s hard to get moral ambiguity on a piece of cardboard from Staples. Instead, you define your villain and make every attribute from the dropdown (colonialism, imperialism, apartheid) stick. With the widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd, the villain began, understandably, as the police. In the aftermath of the major demonstrations, however, it evolved into anyone who was not a self-avowed anti-racist.

After the October 7 Hamas attacks, American progressives who may not have previously embraced the Palestinian cause found in Israelis a villain as clearcut as the one from June 2020. They held up signs with many variations on the word “solution.” All that tedious history of wars and failed negotiations could be rolled up in “colonialism” and other crimes against humanity attributed to the villain.

The financial panic that began with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank introduced us to an odd phrase for such a sterile, suburban-backdrop event: being made whole.

Being made whole is an outcome people expect from lovers—naively as it turns out, at least according to songs. What really plucks the heartstrings is not that the people desired often fail to honor this expectation but the way in which those doing the desiring confront reality. This is what reroutes the Love Train into the self-help aisle.

But in regard to banks, whose idea was it to describe a failed bank’s large depositors holding on to every last cent as being “made whole”? Does the simple fact of having assets make you, as an entity, deserve to be whole? I might buy that concept if all depositors were people, but they’re not.

The Marjorie Taylor Greene in white fur meme had nearly played itself out by the time Michael Che added the coup-de-grâce of “Cocaine Bear.” The pitifully comic spectacle of Green’s incivility at President Biden’s State of the Union address and the gory comic spectacle of a coked-up CGI bear are neck and neck when it comes to insulting real live bears.

We seem to be having a Bear Moment—pure coincidence but nonetheless illuminating. In addition to Cocaine Bear, there’s a Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie, the Iranian film No Bears, and a streaming series The Bear. Since last year we’ve been in a Fed-induced Bear Market, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought the Sleeping Bear of old political cartoons back to life.

In the movie Operation Mincemeat, about the infamous 1943 British hoax to disguise the Allies’ invasion of Sicily during World War II, there’s a Churchill scene where the P.M. sits in a dark paneled chamber subtly adorned with landscape paintings—oils of green-on-green and muted gray skies, gold frames nicely aged. As the camera pans the room’s perimeter, it takes in these bygone status signifiers one after another, like those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons where a character is running indoors and the same vase of flowers on a round accent table keeps scrolling by.

This is not to diminish the classic green landscape painting, a genre not exclusive to the Brits (see: Barbizon School) but one more beloved in their country than anywhere else on the planet. It’s to emphasize Winston Churchill’s intense love of painting as an act, his love of the natural world and the look of his native land.

When I read that the art critic Peter Schjeldahl had died on October 21, I was surprised that my eyes teared up. I knew from a New Yorker essay of his that he had advanced lung cancer. The obituaries said he was 80 and had smoked since he was 16. He was also a recovering alcoholic and apparently not the greatest father. Before 2019, I knew nothing about his personal life beyond his writing on art.

The tears, I realized, were for my own future life without the sensory crescendos of a new Peter Schjeldahl review. I could say unequivocally that he was my favorite living critic, and not having his sensibility in real time felt like a serious loss.

The trailer for the latest Halloween movie—landing more than four decades after the original—is so hard-pressed to titillate that the grisly deaths are shown rather than teased. Predictably, we see the gray-haired Jamie Leigh Curtis enveloped by an old house on Halloween, interacting with various teenage carnage fodder.

That trailer made me think about Getting Out—how it’s a twisted game we play with ourselves. Whether it’s out of the house (harm’s way) or out of a franchise that’s outlived any plausible narrative, we’re always messing it up.

As many have written over the past few weeks, “quiet quitting” has to be the most inane concept of 2022. So you’re going to show your employer you’re checked out by working just 40 so-so hours a week? OK, maverick, but you’ve got nothing on “King-Size Homer,” what many consider the best Simpsons episode of all time (if not for the fat-shaming).

In this 1995 gem, Homer’s reaction to the nuclear power plant’s new exercise program is to pork up to over 300 pounds so he can claim a disability and work at home. He hits his mark and gets a workstation in the living room. All he has to do is press Y on the keyboard all day. Eventually he realizes he can set up his top-hatted “drinking bird” to keep pecking the Y so that he can go off and have fun. When he returns to find the drinking bird collapsed, his prehistoric DOS monitor flashes “Situation Critical, Explosion Imminent.” He has to rush to the plant (hard to do when you’re morbidly obese) to manually shut down the system before there’s a nuclear meltdown.

A few months before the 2016 election, the New Yorker ran a cartoon by Paul Noth that has become iconic. It shows a wolf in a suit on a campaign billboard over the words “I am going to eat you,” while nearby one grazing sheep says approvingly to another, “He tells it like it is.”

What’s interesting about that cartoon beyond its prophecy is that it came from the left. For more than a generation, charging Democrats with being “sheeple” to the lockstep of political correctness has been a core tactic of conservatives and their libertarian apologists. The first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell was, after all, a fluffy thing named Dolly, prone to being herded and led, not a vicious lone carnivore howling in front of a full moon. The cultural implantation of the sheep/wolf metaphor gained traction with The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 and hoofed along to the Wolf of Wall Street, the 2013 blockbuster for which Donald Trump supposedly requested a role that wasn’t just a walk-on.