It is one of the biggest, most lethal, and most fearsome of all venomous snakes. Being struck by a taipan, it is said, is like being hit by a sledgehammer. Its principal prey is rats.

It is also physically imposing, a thing of gold.

Even the fearless Steve Irwin sweated bullets when he wrangled one for his television show.

Why am I bringing this up? Because while we all acknowledge that politicians are reptiles, most of them are far less dangerous than a taipan. We’re all used to the usual cold-blooded ones — the constrictor rat snakes and black snakes and bottom feeder nests of garter snakes who inhabit the drab holes of D.C. Offices.

Eew.

We know about the lizards small and big in the mass media…

We know about the omniscient anchors and pundits…

And we even know about the vast strangling, suffocating, and devouring departments and agencies of the imperial U.S. government.

And the Bushes…

And the Clintons…

And, you know, Reagan.

All of which means the reptile world of American politics is in no way prepared to understand President Trump. They’ve been hunting him for a couple of years now, and every time they think they have him, he turns and strikes them like a hammer, with a venom that killed their credibility long ago and paralyzed their ability to respond. They thought they had fangs or the constrictor power to kill him. His venom has robbed them of both strength and lucidity.

Other parts of the world recognize nothing but power, speed, strength, and potency of venom. Figuratively speaking, Trump’s taipan is from a different continent than they know, and he overwhelms the cobras and mambas and vipers and coral snakes of the predatory outside world Americans have forgotten about.

He is unpredictable, incredibly swift, big, and scary. This does not mean they want to go up against him. Quite the contrary. He taught them in a single stroke that America is no longer a slithering sneak on the world stage as it has been for the last eight years. The Democrats have been remarkably slow to discover the power of his venom. The world at large isn’t as dumb or slow as tortoises and snapping turtles. They’ve already learned a lesson the Trump haters of all stripes just don’t get. He’s the most powerful snake in the global zoo. That was the point of the airstrike. The Middle East got it. The Chinese got it. The Russians got it. Even the Pakistanis got it. Doesn’t matter what they say, they got it. And Trump had a nice dinner afterwards with Emperor Xi. If you think the world isn’t still afraid of Aegis destroyers, American aircraft carriers, and the most formidable Air Force on the planet, take a sedative and some warm milk and go to bed.

P.S. Alternative and completely counterintuitive music for those who understand the concept of three dimensional chess, which I recently discussed with my friend Patrick vis a vis Trump. Lucidity is a rare gift. If you don’t have it, you’ll never know you don’t.

Michael White is supposed to be the best clarinet in the world. Maybe he is. But I’ll go with this guy.

He was a white guy, and he liked white guy jazz. For example:

But he was also devoted to these guys. Go figure.

He was a good and fair man, my father. He just hid it well.

Women think they’re better. They love better. They think better. They move better. Wrong. They mimic better. They fake better. And they know mostly nothing.

So there’s always a trick, right?

And a twist. I was certain that the Doris Day Camille Paglia hates so much would have this song on YouTube. Not so. She has this instead.

The one you love is always up to you.

Jake and Elwood hanging out.

Before they got convicted.

Then Jake got out. And Elwood came to pick him up.

Elwood was anxious to please.

Elwood wants Gahd.

Jake was, well, just Jake.

Jake kind of IS Gahd, only with shorter legs.

What they think they’re riding around in. We can live with that.

So. Our guys can handle anything. Elwood is big. Jake swings the whip.

The rest of the time they sleep. Until it’s time to go bye-byes.

Comey. “You’ve got me for 6 and a half more years.”

My favorite Pauline Kael movie review was of Godfather 2. She thought Al Pacino’s performance was genius. Without ever moving his face, he descended from war hero to soulless gangster by rotting inside on camera. She was right.

Rot shows. Doesn’t it?

Toothpick Wisdumb.

Actor Richard Dreyfuss says he made a mistake in voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but that didn’t mean he had nice things to say about President Donald Trump.

In an interview Tuesday on Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto, the Oscar-winning actor and star of the new FOX show Shots Fired said he did vote for Clinton “and I regret it.”

“Because Hillary is too much of a bought-and-paid-for Wall Street…” Dreyfuss explained, trailing off.

When asked about tax reform and the president’s proposed defense budget spending increases, Dreyfuss replied by calling Trump an “idiot” who should not have been elected president.

“I think he’s an idiot. I think that Donald Trump is not the one to be trusted about any of the details,” Dreyfuss said, adding that Trump is “something, like with a big funny nose.”

“Donald Trump, regardless of his party, lacks simple common decency and he should not be in the presidency,” the actor said referring to Trump’s rhetoric toward his Republican rivals during the presidential campaign.

“Right on, dude,” his twin said. “Think I’ll get me one of them cool toothpicks. Cheaper sign of no class than a tattoo, right?”

It should be noted that Richard Dreyfuss has every right to call Donald Trump an idiot. Trump is only a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Dreyfuss on the other hand attended the far more prestigious San Fernando Valley State College for almost a year before he dropped out to become a conscientious objector. Not as a battlefield medic but as an orderly. In California. Ghandian-like credentials, n’est-ce pas?

Recidivism pays.

Redemption waits.

It’s still there 40 and 240 years later. You can’t really erase it or knock it down, snowflakes.

Back in 1978 I was 25 and in objective terms an utter failure. A dropout, a month shy of graduation, from the Cornell Graduate Business School. I had become suddenly afraid that I would become a CPA. And just as suddenly unemployable.

Inherited a job in my hometown from my sister, editor-in-chief of a Bicentennial publication called The Way It Used to Be, sponsored by the Salem County Historical Society.

Her tenure was almost exclusively about women. Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Mine was different: What the hell am I doing here?

But in my usual way, I got lucky. She was editor during the 1776 celebrations, which were national, flag waving, and generic. Why she tried to drill down into ‘issues’ that concerned her, namely women. When I took over, we were on the cusp of Salem County’s REAL participation in the Revolution, a local militia defense against a multi-pronged British offensive on a key barrier to the agricultural resources of South Jersey.

it was called the Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge. It happened. Big names were involved. Mad Anthony Wayne. John Graves Simcoe, colonel of the Queen’s Rangers. I was handed a manuscript by an elderly Woodstown dentist-historian who had written a pamphlet called “When War Came to Salem.” Review it or something was my instruction.

So I did. In the Salem newspaper, Today’s Sunbeam.

Then I got called into a meeting with the publisher of the Sunbeam and a man named Stony Harris. The publisher, an eminence grise named Thomas Bowen, who couldn’t have cared less about the daily content of his daily paper, said, “Stony thinks we might be able to do a Reenactment. What do you think?”

I knew OF Stony Harris. He was a legend. The founder of Cowtown Rodeo, the local cattleman who prided himself on traveling to cattle rancher conventions in Texas for the express purpose of reminding them that his family’s cattle brand was older than any in Texas. He wore a cool ivory cowboy hat and a string tie. His eyes were miss-nothing blue. He looked at me, friendly, casual, penetrating. “What do you think, son? Tom thinks we can do it.”

Everything after that was kind of a blur. I made a plan, an impossibly ambitious one. At every turn when resources were needed, Stony provided them. I was a general, arranging for Continental and British troops, instructing county works department employees on signs demarking the course of the skirmish in three locations, writing everything from the sign copy to the promos for the event, and when it came time to prepare for the key event, the axing of the bridge over Alloways Creek in Quinton, Stony Harris had the bridge made in a single day. I got to watch like Napoleon on his log at Waterloo. Except disaster never came.

It all came off without a hitch.

And I can prove it happened.

I guess we didn’t hit the right date. My first promo under my own byline for the Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge was published on September 11, 1978. Go figure.

yeah. Date proven.

It was a five part series in Tom Bowen’s paper.

Part Five was this.

Defiance.

The still missing middle was this:

Bridge.

Heroes.

Bacon.

Don’t be fooled. The conquest of Alloways Creek was for the Brits a phantom victory. While the Salem militia held up the Queen’s Rangers, Mad Anthony Wayne scooped out all the hay, food, and cattle in Cumberland and Atlantic counties. Which was a lot. Hallelujah.

The Cohansey line was my line.

Oh you millennials. Probably no way you get the lessons of this experience. I was a lackadaisical snob in my home of homes, where I had one grandmother in the D.A.R. and one in the Colonial Dames. Meant nothing to me till I got drafted into a re-experiencing of an authentic historical event. And had to work and organize and decide and see and hear and smell it. Command decisions about when to move, responsible for sweat and gunfire and axe blows and genuine yelling, even in reenactment. Call it Project Management 101.

What you’ll probably never learn. Real responsibility is actually fun. I actually found green buckskins for the Queen’s Rangers. Try it. You’ll like it.

P.S. The Brits were thieves too. They stole a grandfather clock from Benjamin Holme in the 1778 raid, which was eventually recovered and is now on display at the Salem Historical Society.

The Benjamin Holme house

Wouldn’t mention it, but I’m a Cohansey boy, meaning a Greenwich boy. I lived in the Benjamin Reeve house on Ye Greate Street. The house is unnaturally tall because Reeve was also a maker of grandfather clocks. We Greenwichers were as instrumental to the times as the Salemites were, if you catch my drift.

The Benjamin Reeve House

It’s in the blood, dude. My grandfather also made grandfather clocks. Want to talk about White Privilege, do you? Some things are earned, come hell or high water, both of which we have in Elsinboro.

See, snowflakes? We really are Satanic. When the grandfather clock chimes twelve, you’re done. But time, the river of history, and our places in it are never done.

Some history. I wrote Deerhound Diary to get away from it all. Then, when I couldn’t get away from it all, I went on to a blog called InstaPunk Rules. Over a thousand posts. But the lords of WordPress decided to shut me down. I can no longer post there. As soon as I log in, I am informed that there has been a system error and I can’t even see my past posts, let alone create a new one.

But I’m an old dog with an old bag of tricks. Deerhound Diary is still where I abandoned it. Raebert is seven now, a divine number in the scheme of things.

I will blog from here as if I had never left. Watch this space.