Disclaiming the Dissonance
♫ And now we’re back where we started
Here we go around again ♫
https://youtu.be/LeQSjbCYOX4?si=B3EbNkJJVaOBtDzN
Dave’s not here, man.
While Killsock rests his bird brain1 and indulges in any ornithologist’s most-conflicting holiday tradition of feasting on various farm-raised and wild fowl, your once2 and future3 Saturday-into Monday WPT header host Uvular happily takes the reins. Aves appreciation posts should resume the second week of December 2025. During the interregnum, grit your teeth to simulate a grin. What other choice presents itself?
♬ As it gets colder
I grow older, not wiser
In my anger ♬
Two days after the precipitating event, Uvular posted a Politics Thread comments stating, in full, “Senate Democrats who caved on the federal government shutdown shall forever bear the mark of Kaine.”4
Chortle away.
Recognize, however, the wordplay dribbled out from a tightly capped geyser of pure rage. Despite two (2) needle drops,5 the constant buzz of unfocused bad energy filling Uvular’s head every waking second since the summer of 2016 actually soundtracks this header.
The drivers of the discontent merit no elucidation to habitues of this frequently shunned corner of a by-design ultra niche forum—racism, misogyny, and homo/transphobia as governing ideologies; mooting the rule of law; grifting that looks all the world like smash and grabs; murders by military; ignorance ascendant; et cetera. Looking away seems a betrayal of victims. Numbing went off the menu when Uvular got sober in March 2014. Violence never enters the internal monologue.
So, you get the japes and jests and, sometimes, only rarely, actual jokes such as “A drunk, an idiot, and a racist walk into a bar. The bartender turns to a regular and says, ‘I thought we banned Pete Hegseth.’”6
Uvular could do worse. He promises to promise to try to attempt to perhaps contemplate doing better. Share below how you as a Politicado or just regular person channel less than productive and nigh unto harmful thoughts and feelings triggered by news of the world.
But let’s get back to that “mark of Kaine” quip. The humor, should any exist, stems from referencing the “mark of Cain” a petulant deity placed on the murder of said deity’s favorite offerant of immolated oxen. Read all about it in Genesis 4. The mark, um, marked Cain as unfavored but also unkillable. And Cain’s progeny went on to invent musical instruments, tools, and weapons that caused all kinds of grief.
We shall know and not forgive caving Senate Democrats even as they live on to wreak further mischief. Metaphor! Genius.
The really clever bit of the “mark of Kaine” phrase, though, comes from readers or listeners understanding that “Cain” and “Kaine” rhyme. All great jokes work as poems. Or doggerel, at least. Cadence, consonance, assonance,7 and a bunch of other techniques combine to tickle a funny bone instead of cleaving a skull.
Great. Except no. Racists, especially in America, decided dark skin tones constituted the mark of Cain. Read all about it in the Journal of Biblical Literature. Which makes Uvular newly angry at racists for dirtying a perfectly good allusion. Fuckers cannot let us have a single nice thing.
Stayed tuned to see how Uvular puns his way out of this one.