It was a camel!

[rachelmanija]

This clip from CNN is well worth listening to.

It encapsulates both the jaw-dropping awfulness and bizarreness of the Orange Supremacist era, and the extent to which the mainstream media has gotten so appalled that they're dropping their usual false equivalency. I mean the old "both sides have a point," which works when both sides DO have a point, but does not when you're talking about Nazis vs. anti-Nazis or Cheetolini vs. human beings with empathy. Also, it made me laugh.

Yesterday post-rally hederahelix and I were discussing this.

"It's just so surreal," she said. "Hey... Is that a camel?"

I looked over. The U-haul next to us had a giant camel painted on the side.

Below the camel, as if in explanation of why a U-haul would be decorated with a giant camel, were a few lines of Wikipedia-esque notes on camels, something like "A camel is an even-toed ungulate within the genus Camelus, bearing distinctive fatty deposits known as "humps" on its back."

Comments

[redbird]

U-Haul trucks are like that, though the out-of-context stuff is often geography. I'll be minding my own business in New York, and here's information on a random bit of the Rocky Mountains.

[shati]

The events at the beginning of the CNN clip feel like years ago.

On the subject of the surreality of US political news (and ungulates, I guess), just because I'm not over it, I read this quote from one of the Republican white supremacist almost-speakers at the Boston Nazi rally:

"I did sacrifice a goat. I know that's probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans," he said. "I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness ... Yes, I drank the goat's blood."

and spent at least 20 minutes genuinely dazed, trying to reconcile that quote with the fact that I was reading actual news and not the Onion.

[conuly]

Amazing. She kept a straight face.

[ekaterinn]

I was saw something even more bizarre on an U-Haul: camels walking across snow. I thought my eyes were deceiving me but as I got closer I realised it was a real picture: https://www.uhaul.com/SuperGraphics/266/Venture-Across-America-and-Canada-Modern/Yukon

Come to think about it, "I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but it was real" is a pretty apt metaphor for the past six months.

[staranise]

I've forgotten or never heard of some of the things on that list. I've lost track. And I read a lot.