Try to Remember the Kind of September

A Ledger of Inanities, Pageantries, and Preventable Plagues

September, once a gentle custodian of cider and remembrance, has arrived instead as a carnival barker with a cracked bell. Behold a month where Nature performs catastrophe, Officialdom performs competence, and Everyone Else performs for the camera. We have set quill to parchment to swirl it all together—storms and sermons, moonwalks and mandates, pomp and poltroonery—into a single ledger of the ludicrous.

I. Processions of the Preventable

The Surgeon General of Freedom™ trumpets a new dispensation: mandates banished, childhood diseases invited. In the public square, a parade of Little Deaths—Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio—carry pennants like alumni returning for Homecoming. “Personal choice,” he intones, and the viruses curtsey. Leeches polish their resumes.

ASIDE: On Pedagogy & Tablets. In Texas, pious décor is once more proposed as pedagogy—Commandments mounted like antlers in a schoolhouse. We await the appendix tablet reading, “Special Terms & Conditions Apply,” signed by an attorney who moonlights as a prophet.

II. Pageantry for the Camera, Penance for the Clerk

Cabinet courtiers beam compulsory “praise reels” to the provinces. Somewhere in a ranger station, a bear signs for the parcel while a junior naturalist mouths along to the weekly encomium. Elsewhere, a Superintendent preaches rectitude to a lens he forgets is still on—like a bishop explaining thrift from a chaise longue.

Supplementary curios: A town-hall petitioner moonwalks into a tax speech; a mountaineer in an ice-cream cone costume ascends with dry ice and mercy; a tote bag declares “Definitely Not A Bag Full of Drugs” with all the sincerity of a campaign promise.

III. Nature’s Theatre & the Bureaucrat’s Umbrella

Floods rehearse for their Broadway transfer; a tornado auditions in a coastal town; solar farms quarrel with forests as if trees were a rumor. Bridges shrug beneath trucks, rails argue with schedules, and the paperwork, ever diligent, insists all was compliant on page 7, subsection (b).

FIELD NOTES. When the waters come, the press conference arrives in matching jackets. The podium is waterproof; the truth is not.

IV. Diplomacy as Pantomime

In the North, a summit unspools like a holiday pageant: applause too loud, concessions too quiet, a map redrawn in the footnotes. Far across seas, a state visit arrives with carriages, plumes, and a hat brim deep enough to hide an era. The crowd is kept at a respectful distance; the irony is not.

V. The Culture of Consequence, Deferred

A pundit is harmed on a podium, and the nation sprints to its corners to assign omens. Another ex-chief finds himself in a courtroom measuring the length of history in sentencing guidelines. Grief is real; so too is the choreography that follows. Our politics remains a church of spectacle with a collection plate for rage.

VI. Accounts Receivable: September

Tally the ledger: Public health in arrears, infrastructure in dudgeon, decorum in receivership. The month presents its invoice in triplicate and requests immediate remittance of our attention. We pay it, of course—dearly—because absurdity is legal tender and spectacle, the national bank.

Housekeeping. If you spotted an absurdity we missed, leave it with the clerk by the door; it will be indexed under Chronicles of Misrule and shelved beside “Festival of the Preventable.”