I have been incubating nothing. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Incidentally, sitting on eggs to keep them warm is called “brooding.” In the 16th C, in Nürnberg, there was a cobbler, choir singer, and habitual writer of plays, songs, and poems, named Hans Sachs, who among his other works wrote a short comic Fastnachtsspiel, a play for Shrovetide, or Carnival, called Das Kälberbrüten. At University of Michigan, Professor Martin Walsh, now Lecturer Emeritus, introduced it to me in translation as “Brooding Calves.” It begins with a peasant sitting on a large wheel of cheese, out of which he believes cattle will hatch.
That’s exactly what goes through my head when people ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?” They emerge spontaneously, like calves out of cheese.
When chickens brood, they don’t crush their eggs, because their butts are feathered and fluffy, their bones light and porous, and the albumen and yolk inside the shells pushes back against the pressure of the chicken’s weight.
Now, I possess about as peach-like a butt as a middle-aged white man can boast, but it is by no means fluffy. And a hollow egg has nothing inside it to support the shell by pushing against my weight. So brooding nothing is not an easy thing for someone with my gender and age handicaps.
But do I get special consideration? Nope.
You know who gets special consideration for brooding their ideas? The Conservative Political Action Committee. They had this great idea to partner with Viktor Orbán, autocratic leader of Hungary, and apparently a conservative movement hero. They held their recent convention of global whining and xenophobic tantrums in Hungary. And fascist strongman Orbán, the conservative hero, delivered the keynote speech.
HUNGARY
Ring any bells? Any Jews, gay people, communists, Catholics, Poles, or Roma have surviving memories of Hungary? My neighbor when I was growing up had a tattoo on her arm from a Hungarian concentration camp.
Now, CPAC, the international fundraising and organizing wing of the GOP, had this great idea to announce how fascist they are in Budapest. CPAC's organizers picked anti-democratic, autocratically-led Hungary because they consider it "one of the bastions of the conservative resistance to the ultraprogressive 'woke' revolution," according to CPAC's website.
This represents the most obvious symptom of the internationalization of the fascist movement Steve Bannon first spearheaded spreading the ideology all over Europe.
How did the organizers of CPAC brood these spectacular ideas? Their tushies are even more bony than mine. Did they have to hire chickens to sit on their viper eggs? Did they perhaps even hire vipers?
No, they get special consideration, because legally psychotic talking head Rick Santorum belongs to their organization. Santorum is the also the term for a warm slurry of poo, jizz, and lube that oozes out of tushies after anal copulation. And Rick Santorum has the evangelical ability to transform into that substance. It’s similar to how Styrofoam wafers and wine turn into the body and blood of Jesus. Rick Santorum becomes that substance, manifest in the world, and butters those conservative viper eggs in his warmth, thereby brooding them while Bannon and the rest of the international Nazis go about the business of schmoozing each other up. In the end it’s a whole lot of buttering, but with divisions of labor, as is appropriate to any capitalist fanaticism.
Do I get such special consideration? Do I get such special rights? No. Because I don’t qualify for the mentally handicapped fascist discount at Chick-fil-A, the same card that gets you into all the zany events at CPAC, Hungary.
Now, I know identity politics has its problems, mainly when it distracts from and derails discussions of class interests, but I’m pretty sure that going all international-Nazi-conference-in- fascist-Hungary about it is an overreaction. I’m pretty sure going all Seb Gorka about pronouns is overkill.
You know who else gets special treatment when brooding their ideas? Netflix comedians. Trans people aren’t new. Trans people have been around even since before Eddie Murphy was caught giving a ride to Samoan trans performer and sex worker Shalimar Seiuli back in 97. Other trans sex workers Murphy loved to pay for sex were given about fifteen thousand a pop to keep their stories on the DL.
But now that there are all-gender toilets in some woke places, and trans people’s self-definitions are beginning to be respected, Dave Chapelle, and now copycat trans-disparager and prestige TV factory Ricky Gervais, have used Netflix as a bully pulpit to bully the trans community with their brilliant definitions of gender. Heedless of Eddie Murphy’s preference for ladies with male genitalia, Gervais urges women to lose theirs. Did he clear this demand with Eddie Murphy, who is an elder statesman of the comedy and sex renters communities? Or did both Gervais and Chapelle decide to be on team Hitler independently?
We may never know how these Netflix elitists got on the same page about being okay with bigotry. But we do know they get special privileges when brooding their poisonous snake eggs. They get special saunas that help raise their core temperatures so that all they have to do is stand next to their eggs to incubate them. They are technologically-enhanced incubators. Like Tucker Carlson’s irradiated balls are meant to be. Gervais and Chapelle are basically Tucker Carlson’s ideal testicles.
I, on the other hand, being an impoverished, mouthy leftwing writer, have to make my own hot air, standing in an uncomfortable CIA stress position, radiating as much infrared energy as I can from my hovering buttocks, incubating my empty eggs by pure gumption.
But, let me assure you, when my nothing hatches, it will outshine any and all the basilisk, chimerical somethings the more privileged brooders in our hierarchy could ever come up with. Originality. It just takes time, my friends.