Trump, with his nonpareil penchant to huff bluster on his idiomatic ideologue’s intractably instigated immolation, has recently aggravated the strain of seeing to his presumedly plenteous and plenitudinous diurnalities, what with: his avid interest materializing a virtually unsurpassed dynamic industry in the fixed resolution to erect a Victory Arch ere the feculent dike has been demolished and its spewed, pestiferously fecund matter disembarrassed from, peradventure an enterprising adventure in constructing confidence unencumbered and frolicsome in that sultry fen alfresco, and, if only to reproachfully placate those apostates of the State, one could not be faithfully stray as a shambling sycophant in a phantasm should they avow that fundamentally the needful outlay shall be requisitioned in vitreous crockery (let us not stare intently into a speculatory speculum, through to pecuniary pudenda; it is rather uncivilised to dwell at any length upon intimate affairs of personal conscience like fiscal expenditures and their provenance, best left to providence to neatly rectify itself; after all, “it can only good happen” [what terse sapienciality (though perchance tout court in le tout court is the genus of the genius), like the hapax legomena of a hermetic hermeneutic patristic pandit folvating to the vical vomit and gingerly prodding at it in solepsistic solecism with his brambling crook before he malacclimates to the sour stench; what is more, the spider’s parlance which has ensconced us in its gossamer gaol like a wispy cage of exatmospherised tanagra dust, a relict shadowing its razed raisers, a shimmering translunary (Artemis cannot escape the voyaging voyeurism of Actaon, his pulverized skyphos even yet in the cosmos watering her eyes as she soars on by) momento mutilare]) brimming over with chinksome fens, begotten by virtue of our godhead’s inordinate, unordained arrafa (inshallah, it shall abide evermore [controvertible, in posteriori, to the mid-terms]); the commencement of indemnifying against the cozily cozened mulct illegally and improperly (what is high-binding legalese and puritanical propriety to the working joe, but bureaucratic impediments to pilfering him in the honest, lucid, expeditious manner; ’tis the charmingly russet rustling of artisanal defalcation, in the tradition of our forefathers’ Old World ancestors) imposed upon the nation’s free intercourse on the meagre authority of the President on his lonesome (though whither constitutive, empowered body ought to be entrusted to formulate and ratify needful decrees I know not; Congress is more of a particularly poorly lettered debating society than a legislative assembly latterly, whence emits the unduly disruptive din of desks rifled through and chairs huffily flopped in, syncopated with the ill suppressed quivering cuivre of intrestranged and antagonistic brass); with the aid and council of a doddering bestiary of anthropoids malingering well beyond the juncture of temperamental and capatial deterioration whereof the cool-headed prognosticator would soberly stress the most effective panacea as a capias on their caput caput, like Citizen Capet tumbriling unceremoniously from his gallous carte blanche, that we might obtain some good in bedaubing the ceiling in stunning cerise and jaunty rose, as well as furnishing fodder to the tattling bedaud (TMZ, you noble and selfless titivators of his Majesty’s Zenana, goad these liminally languishing souls to aneale themselves before the testementary executor that he would aneale them with the flourish of the serrated crown of serene nihil); that troupe of caricatures could spawn many a tale, what with biblically bibulous libertines, an osmotically concussed pugilistic-impresario, a connoiseur of exotic cuts of roadkill, the neighbour and business partner of J. Epstein, the kind of supremely objectionable cretin who perceives blowing out the brains of a vital dog as recommending her aptitude for a political profession (what is more discomfiting is the undeniable truth to such a bucholeric-buccaneering similitude [“What do you suppose is eating” at them (excepting the sole solium)?]), to be replaced by an erstwhile MMA bruiser who through a stunted psyche or a flawed stratagem has abidingly emulated the persona of the repressed yokel who retains a stoic impassivity and reticence of mien at all duress, even despite a propensity for unrepentant and rampant truculency, which services as a fairly sheer guise for a mind largely destitute of creative or keen facilities…but, the author rather disrelishes sniping from so lofty and secure a castellation at that piteously discongruous congeries, and so we proceed.
Yes, yet thus harried and molested, the President has taken the liberty to reprove the Pope of all illustrious luminary for acknowing his pronounced abjural of his administration’s conduct as to immigration (“when people have lived good lives—many of them for 10, 15, 20 years—treating them in a way that is, to say the least, extremely disrespectful, and with instances of violence, is troubling.”) and Iran (“[in censure of the President’s apocalyptic prophesying] Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable”), inveighing against him as one might expect him to abase a home-grown political nuisance, in his signature chirping syntax (or that which a factitious factotum has conchedly down rote) as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” The obsequiously simpering Vice (I am at some difficulty of distinguishing any particular sin exhibited thence as a harmotia, but, his expedient, driveling thong lashing lends credence to the aspirants of avarice or hubris, both of which could well be espied in the next indited rank impudence) President scampered with affected eagerness to cobble together a meagre gainsay (intransigent prolepsis abound, here’s this, “When the U.S. and Israel incited this war (or conflict if that politically incorrect nomenclature erects your dander) the Republicans were lovingly thumped in the mid-terms) in executive solidarity, enjoining the Pope to “stick to matters of morality.” The precise lithe contorsions requisite to prescind morality from war and deportation would seem to strain credulity to flinders, and if we were to take him on his strict word would leave little dispute in the contention Vice President Vance does not consider morality of any kind to impinge upon his realpolitiking; but, to instance an example of Christian charity, perhaps his intention was to delineate ‘twixt temporal and transcendent matters. But even this is a fairly laughable demarcation, for of course one, if they are to avow themselves as a Christian, needs must instantiate the beatific imputations in praxis; and is not the legacy of Christianity so oft-eulogized in the tangible immanence of its prescient dictums and percipient doctrines to our Constitution and country as a whole? Not quite as maximopere mandibularly myotonic as Tordesillas, but whither wherewith a volatile volancy to, as a Catholic, tautologically beholden to the dogma of papal infallibility, chastise the Pope ‘se ultra crepidum,’ and though I would think it pragmatically inadvisable, yet still it be a just wield of his cardinal prerogative to excommunicate this primping peacock who “doth protest too much, methinks,” but I am but a lowly bedraggled wastrel as I am.
That which piqued both the tension of this tiff and my interest in the affair was the invocation of the ‘precedent’ of the Avignon Papacy by an unnamed Pentagon official inter alia a seemingly contentious confrontation with the Vatican ambassador, as I was mildly impressed that anyone in the government of today is equipped both with the necessary foreknowledge and the almost admirable temerity to brandish it ‘fore, I presume, an aghast and indignant legation of he who commands the allegiance of a pervasively proselytized voting bloc of the administration he so feverishly (perhaps he merely wished to flex his historian’s muscle, but as a byproduct highlighted the tender contours of his Achilles heel, an impulse I do warmly sympathise with) rushes in defense whereof. My bemused approbation derives not from the esoteric trace the institution in question abides in the history books, for it was, if not epochal ex proprio vigore, certainly portentious of the like, but rather an apprehension of the modish habit permeating the Potomac of donning specious spectacles all the live-long day.
To succinctly (I can clad against the clags of the palabric perennial stream, I know I can) sketch a rudimentary conception of the reference in question: the centralizing tendency of the kingdoms of Europe underway in earnest by the early 14th century, these grasping nouveau reache chafed at the millennial hegemony of the Papacy. The King of France yclept Philip IV, in part engendered by a pertinacious and domineering temperament, in part from the transalpine propiquancy of their respective domains, cast out le Roi’s de fer shackles of le masque, looping to muzzle along the gamut of society, from the Jews to the nobility to the Knights Templar to the papacy, the last of which he sought to levy imposts upon. The pontiff of the time having but recently promulgated the papal bull Unam sanctum, the most notorious monument to the extravagancy of sarcedotal hierocracy, smelt the pungent waftings of dung in these mintrelesque mistrals cresting and gusting down the mountains, and vehemently contemned and resisted the violation whereof, culminating in the arrest and confinement of the Pope by French troops (in conjunction with the decampment of the same in 1870, denuding the wobbling seat of a patrial Papacy of its third spindle, is it little wonder the Pope acceded to a concordat with Hitler? [yes]), whence ensued his death less than a month after. The conclave’s stove was in unusual demand in its early years, for his successor’s pontiff compassed less than a year, whereof Philip IV beheld and held yet another opportunity to enforce his will; he successfully pressured the Conclave to elect a Frenchman, Clement V, who refused to commute out from the communes and declared he would “work-from-home”, uprooting the Papacy from Rome to Avignon on the French side of the Alpine border, proximate (from an Usonian’s zoomed-out lens) to Nice.
Thus the threat registers as out of all proportion to the summons of mere rhetorical denunciation (at least King Philip felt the palpable Papal tug of the purse strings on those of the palpitating variety), whatever its potential harm to the prospectus in November, which was mostly self-inflicted by taking up the whipping fasci subsequent to so piffling a provocation; nary shall be found in diplomatic annals so egregious a breach of etiquette, which might, had any vestige of restraint been exercise, been used to curry comity or at the least a quiet complicity, of a rudimentary understanding of tact to so esteemed a personage as the head of the single most numerous Christian denomination (this second administration has pulled many a page out of the fascist polemics, why not rifle through the pages on the assimilation of religious fervour? [at the rifle if need be, but let the threat be tacit]), of a sense of decency, or, if this cannot at moil be mustered, the pretense of courtesy.
In tandem to this spectacular spate, the President divined in his inscrutably sage sense of timing, the moment as ripe to post on TruthSocial an AI-generated depiction of himself gracing an infirmed man (who has been irreverently likened to J. Epstein, but I think the reminiscence extends only so far as skin tone and an oblong countenance; he bares a much more marked resemblance to Jon Stewart) with a coruscant King’s touch, whence and its brother effuses shafts of golden brilliance, garbed in the vestment of an apostle, a purloined vermillion stole falling from his neck, and, to cap off the lapidary ineffacibility of this anthumous hagiograph, with qaren envoy of Beelzebub in the vanguard of our troops looming above him, forsooth, as if in a concerted effort to alienate his Catholic or otherwise orthodox flock, and less devout but nonetheless sensible persons besides.
All and all, Jesus’ Second Coming was but a sour souse in the mush in beliance and betrayal of the promissory marvel of the original iteration, a veritable slap in the face to all his long-suffering, staunchly devoted fanatics who have sith times of yore desiderated in anticipation of the sequel. What a crying shame! I suppose we must resign ourselves to find some sort of solatium in the feeble, beleaguered, fugitive hopes for a lucid and lucent finale to the tripped-tich, as we, glum and subdued, unseeingly stare through the glass, darkly.
