The grim pinata

I remembered a favourite misremembered quote today, William Goldman's famous line about Hollywood. “Nobody knows nothin' about anything.” The actual quote is more articulate and measured: “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work.” It doesn't pack the same South Bronx punch, but both versions nail the point.

We’re all pretending, but some of us are leaning into it a little harder. I’ll fess up here on behalf of the honourable guild of hot-take merchants, that we’re all guilty of pretending to know a little more about the world of real things than the world might attest to on our behalf. Does that make us no better than the hapless subjects of our never-ending takes?

Why, yes! Yes, it does, because what we do is mostly harmless, whereas what they do can often be more accurately defined as crimes against humanity or, at the very least, as an accessory to those crimes.

And there is a great imbalance in the Force here, because while they never seem to tire of perpetrating their various crimes and outrages, indeed the commission of the crime seems merely to feed the appetite for more—(Lookin’ at you, Bibi)—there often comes a moment in the hot take biz when the fire dies out.

This morning I am ashes.

Our column today was supposed to engage with Albo’s ‘We Warned the Tsar Ayatollah Moment’ after the US bombed a large, empty hole inside an Iranian mountain to turn it into an even larger but still predictably empty hole. ‘Predictably’, because the previous contents of the earlier hole, hundreds of kilograms of highly-enriched soon-to-be-weapons-grade uranium, had been observably removed from said hole during the two weeks the US president was shit-posting about his plans to bomb them.

This was exactly the sort of crisis that typically inspires within your correspondent an agreeable shudder of sardonic delight.

But not even halfway through bashing the grim pinata of the week’s news feed, something in my enthusiasm simply… failed. It wasn’t a spectacular moral collapse, more like the small, polite pop of a decaying spinal disc finally disintegrating in the middle of the geopolitical rhumba class I had intended to teach this morning.

Turns out even bitter cynicism can have safe operating parameters beyond which it is probably not a good idea to stray.

If Albo wasn’t going to say what he really thought about the bombing, (“Fuck me, this jibbering orange shit gibbon is gonna kill us all.”) he did have the option of saying nothing. It’s not as though anybody in Tehran, Washington or Rooty Hill was staying up past their bedtime waiting for him to weigh in.

But no, we got Albo trying on his hard-boiled diplomat outfit with the confidence of a man who’s already on stage before he suspects his pants might be inside out.

It’s exhausting, this bullshit. And not the heroic exhaustion you got from winning a hammer fight with three shrieking cocaine monkeys on the roof of a motel in Denpasar that one time, but rather the corrosive, low-grade spiritual drain of repeatedly hoping for mere competence and decency in public life. These arguably shouldn’t be moonshots.

And yet, we have to decode this rubbish

These are strange and savage times, my friends, and most Friday mornings I feel myself being slowly crushed beneath history’s grindstone. But slowly enough that I can at least get a few quips off before getting smooshed into a fine paste. Not so much today, though.

William Goldman was clear: nobody knows anything. Yes, he was originally explaining Hollywood, but those three words feel Nostradamus-adjacent about everything, everywhere all the time now, from geopolitics to roadhouse sushi.

If I sound tired, it’s because my world-weary cynicism needs a nap. This feels like a distinctly soul-sucking level of ennui, as our French cousins might say if they were feeling especially pleased with their misery.

So what am I serving today? Not insightful analysis, nor witty commentary. Consider this a small, weary pull on the cappuccino machine of incredulous resignation. Because ultimately, as someone very clever once almost said, nobody knows nothin’ about anything. And occasionally admitting that is the most genuinely insightful thing you can write.