November 10, 2016
So Trump’s Not Your President, Huh?
In his first post in almost two years, Killough explains his perspective of the election as a son of the New York Republican establishment....
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January 29, 2013
The New GOP: What’s In an Adjective? Everything.
It’s fait accompli at this point: the wheels of change within the Republican Party are churning and cannot be stopped. Every right-winger from Bobby Jindal, to David Brooks, to the execrable Glenn Beck is calling for an overhaul. That nobody has a game plan, much less a leader for it,...
November 2, 2012
ELECTIONS 2012: Seeking That Objective Reality
From the viewpoint of my own particular reality, it makes no sense whatsoever to vote along party lines. It’s a type of tribal thinking that I have never been able to grasp; it just seems so terribly wrong. And when it comes to America in particular, with its leadership position in the world, it seems all the wronger. As with any job, we hire a person based on qualifications, not party allegiance; that’s something China and Iran does, not here.
A piece I wrote over a year ago (shit, but this election has been endless!), “Do Republicans Dream of Electric Elephants?,” has been getting some traction recently on a political forum by way of a quotation of mine someone appropriately named Bonkers reposted. I’d forgotten I’d written these words, but I stand by them even more today:
I guess my warped way of thinking just can’t embrace the notion of supporting a political party. I understand the need for governance of some kind to maintain social order, I understand being conservative in your views, or liberal, but I question the whole concept of being part of a political organization when so many members of that party are so manifestly corrupt, morally subversive or just plain vile. Why would you want to be part of anything that has even a little bit of rot in it?
April 8, 2012
Trick or Tweet
THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW
by James Killough
My good friend Shawn Riegsecker, whose unique brand of seductive enthusiasm should be patented, set a goal for me three months ago: I should have one quarter of the amount of comedian Rob Delaney’s followers on Twitter by the end of the year. After he fixed that target and I set up my Twitter account, he actually looked up how many followers Delaney has: three hundred thousand, which makes seventy-five thousand for me by 2013. “Hah!” Shawn said. “You’re fucked!”
Real men use BlackBerry.
I am currently at seventy-five followers, three zeros short. It will probably drop to seventy-four by the end of today once Twitter’s algorithmic bots sweep through and find out that @CoastalOptometry isn’t so enthralled by surreal, esoteric quips about atheism that it has followed me, but is in fact a spammer. This means I have to increase my base by over one hundred thousand percent in eight months, if my primary-school math still holds.
October 20, 2011
L’Enfer, C’est Les Autres
THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES
by James Killough
Well, it appears that I’m stupid. Or at least not nearly as intelligent as I think I am.
That’s no surprise. My father once asked me, after telling me my whole life what a genius I was, “Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not as smart as you think you are?” This might have had something to do with dropping out of college for the second time. I don’t remember. I just tucked the statement away in my trophy cabinet of family resentments—it falls to me to keep them shiny and updated—and only vaguely recollect the circumstance, just how his face was red and his jowls were shaking.
We must, of course, lead with a picture of Mama G. shashaying in her favorite nougat muu muu. I never got to comment about how she kept a scrapbook of clippings dedicated to her obsession, Condoleezza Rice. Had the revolution never happened, Rice was going to be her Halloween outfit.
I joined Facebook very late in the game and still remain extremely ambivalent about it. No, I’m not ambivalent. I think it’s… Not my thing, to avoid other invectives. I find it really creepy, for instance, that it seems to know that I have some connection to someone I do have a connection with, but Facebook couldn’t possibly know given my current friends list because there are no mutual friend connections to that other someone. Facebook just knows.