In all, this elaborate sideshow we still call an election isn’t an election at all; it’s an auction, and the cheapness of the bids ought to offend us all.  Lobbyists and Hedge Fund managers at least coughed up bribes, er, bids of at least a million, since that’s what they spend on, say, shirt laundry, but when you get to the banksters, America looks like a four dollar tart.  Really, Goldman Sachs, you’re only coughing up $496,430 to save America from European-style socialism?  Couldn’t you have at least rounded it up?  And JPMorgan Chase only stuffed $317,400 into Mitt’s magic underwear, undoubtedly in crumpled singles.  That’s about what they make on fraudulent overdraft charges in about eight minutes; and yet that’s all they have to spare to oust that commie who once called them (oooh…) fat cats?  Why do they think buying a President is so cheap?

The wrinkle in this, which I don’t think the activist judges on the Supreme Court thought through as they planned to fulfill Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” dream with their errant Citizens United decision, is obvious.  Republican voter totals in Florida were down from 2008, in the double digits.  Could that be the result of a merciless barrage of annoying, repetitive, and sneaky commercials, 13,000 of them?  Before the money tide rolled in, Republicans across the country were much more enthusiastic about voting than understandably dispirited Democrats.  After being doused for weeks in plutocrat-funded sewage, many must have decided they needed to shower on election day.

More interestingly, the attacks were directed at someone most everyone despises, Newt Gingrich.  Thus, though the ad onslaught must certainly have been annoying, it wouldn’t have beeen offensive to most people, particularly those elusive “Independents” needed in the general election.  It will be a little different when the gold-plated fire hoses are aimed at President Obama, who maintains high personal approval, even though both right and left agree he’s been a big disappointment.  Thinking people know Obama isn’t a European socialist intent on destroying capitalism, quite the opposite, and are likely to find attempts to smear him as such both offensive and dumb.  Best of all, Romney has nothing positive at all to say about himself that ordinary voters want to hear, not even 4% worth, so he’ll have to go on lying, flip-flopping, and bumbling while hoping some of his very expensive mud sticks.  Money can buy a lot of things, but love clearly isn’t among them.

Romney seems okay with that, but history might disagree.  Republicans (and the great majority of the media) loved Bush, and simply adored Reagan.  This undeserved and mostly unreciprocated adulation not only buffered them from criticism once in office, but more importantly, it got them there, and the same is true of Obama.  As I’ve said before, and it becomes more obvious each day, no one not named Romney loves Romney, or will admit it if they do.  The cheapness of the donors is, ironically, reflected in the listlessness of the voters.  On paper, Romney is the perfect candidate: looks, money, family, money, business experience, money, and money.  In real life, the paper turns out to be cardboard.

Today Digby pointed to an article By Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair that hit on something I’ve been wondering about myself:  why does 2012, in terms of fashion, art, culture and such, look so similar to, say 1992?  The clothes, the cars, the architecture, the hairstyles, even the music haven’t really changed at all.  It’s great for me, because I don’t like to buy new things all the time, but it’s also pretty unprecedented.  As Digby hints, Anderson only gets about halfway to the answer when he seizes on the nationalization of retail chains for the decline of big fashion changes.  What he barely touches upon is how a similar dynamic has played out in every industry we quaintly still call “culture.”

Take architecture, please.  Although the current stagnation and sameness we see in smaller projects is mostly driven by tacit admission of past mistakes from when every architect took modernism as catechism and walked it off a bare-concrete cliff by the 70′s,  it’s the larger projects that mark the real decline of creativity.  As late as the 70′s, most skyscrapers were built as corporate headquarters; a single client wanted a trademark building and hired someone to build it, hoping to make a little money on the side from the excess space and save room for expansion.   Today, that model has been turned on its head.  Something called a “developer” comes up with a “program” for a generic building, and then hires a bunch of marketers to decide what it should be (and even its name) based on whatever tenants they manage to attract.  Architects, and architecture itself, are just a necessary evil in what’s really just a tawdry money scheme of banksters and charlatans.   Creativity, not to mention quality, invariably get lost in mad scramble to take the money and run and the work left behind, at best, seeks only not to offend.

And I think that’s the gist of it; anything really new, daring, and unprecedented is bound to offend somebody, and in our increasingly financialized era, such wanton and potentially costly upheaval is shunned even at the risk of boring everyone to death.  Worse, the ever more concentrated behemoths that dominate our culture can, by virtue of size alone, squash any upsetting new tastes like a bug, before they ever creep into the culture at large.   Fewer and fewer people make the decisions about what we will wear, buy, live in, drive, listen to, and admire, and they make them for all the wrong reasons, which mostly involve money.

Real creativity, whether it be in music, literature, fashion, or architecture, never makes it past the bean counters, leaving us all with our own greyish, semicircular blob of whatever is being served at the corporate cafeteria.  This comes in handy when you pull out a 20-year old suit and not only isn’t it brown and polyester, but it still looks pretty tasteful, if you can still fit into it.  And if you can’t afford a new car, it helps that the ten-year old one you have isn’t too ridiculously dated.  It’s quite a bit less pleasant, though, when you turn on the radio and hear the same eight songs for months on end, or rehashed mid-century modern architecture hailed as something “new.”

As someone who has cringed at seeing pictures myself decked out in a velour shirt and/or a pair of striped bellbottoms, I also feel sorry for 20-somethings today, who listen to the music of my youth for lack of anything better of their own, and are still into Star Wars, which began in 1976.   The commercial above aired in the 1980′s, cockily lambasting those darn commies and their lack of style; would that Wendy’s had known how things would turn out.  In our hyper-capitalist era, we ended up with no more choice than the Russians, and we aren’t supposed to notice.

When you enter the alternative universe of Politico, it’s always a good idea to steel yourself against infantile false equivalencies, stunningly obvious conventional wisdom, and drearily repeated Republican talking points.  That way, you’ll suffer through far fewer poorly written articles that, like watching Fox News, will make you dumber than if you’d spent your time lighting farts.

Naturally, I go to Politico a lot, because, every once in a while I’ll happen upon something so transcendently idiotic that it makes the whole trip worthwhile.  Just now, the top story announces, without a race of irony, that Sarah Palin is Newt Gingrich’s “secret weapon.”  Given that Newt is plummeting in the Florida polls and all the Republican moneymen are openly after his scalp, one wonders what, exactly, Palin is going to do about his flagging political fortunes.  Shoot a moose?  Better yet, the “writer” quotes ol’ Caribou Barbie at some length, effectively refuting the whole premise of her story by reminding readers that the woman is, well, dumb as a post:

In her latest appearance, Palin stated: “Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him via the establishment’s attacks,” she said, though the original question was about Ron Paul. “They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years.”

Palin then called conservative writer Peggy Noonan “hypocritical” for recently calling Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin.”

“They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don’t subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing,” she said. “That’s that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media that I’ve lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena. So I’m used to it.”

“But in order to help educate the rest of the American public, I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of angry attack muffin verbiage to one and not the other.”

News Flash:  Palin has picked up some new words, and has chosen to start using them, repeatedly, without grasping their, uh, meaning.  “Subscribe.”  “Via.”  “Articulate.”  “Verbiage.”  As Paul Krugman said about Gingrich, “He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”  Palin, on the other hand, is what four-year old sounds like when they’ve learned a new word.  Some secret weapon: idiotic word salad blurted out by an addlepated harridan way past her political, if not Fox, sell date.

Romney must be quaking in his Gucci loafers.

Credit: Glendale Tribune

Seems like that ol’ cocktailhag Governor (!) of Arizona, Jan Brewer has been hitting the bottle again, this time when President Obama was visiting, and managed to make a little scene.  That happens to the best of us, admittedly, but judging by her babbling, incoherent performances every time she’s on television, the woman is never sober.  In a state (and political  party) known for its abundance of cocktailhags, Brewer is clearly the drinkingest one.    The funny thing is that the national media was surprised by this, or pretended to be, anyway.  Just as it’s considered unseemly for the news media to call a lying politician something so graphic as a liar,  it’s even more verboten to call a drunk a drunk.  Thus, people who repeatedly cry and blubber on the job can become, say, Speaker of the House, and a woman who took minutes of television time attempting to conjure up a few phrases of meaningless pablum is called, “Governor Brewer,” with a straight face.

Covering up for politicians who drink to excess has a sordid and bipartisan history; unless someone ends up dead, or perhaps in the Tidal Basin with a stripper, journalists have tended to avoid the subject, even when it is clearly interfering with the politician’s ability to do her job.  Worse, clowns like Brewer and Boehner, softened up by fancy lobbyist hooch, tend to give away the store to whomever paid the last bar tab.  As the temperance ladies knew, strong drink and loose morals go hand in hand.  This lesson seems to be lost on the news media, or more likely, just another thing they’ve decided that the public has no business knowing, particularly when it involves Republicans.

Thus, each bizarre and embarrassing episode, whether of crying, finger-wagging, shouting “You lie!” at the State of the Union or what have you is treated as some quirky expression of passion rather than a recurrent pattern of drunken buffoonery.  It could be said, and there’s plenty of evidence, that President Obama is literally driving Republicans to drink, even more than they already did; but if so that in itself is news.  Since all the arrests, unseemly outbursts, and slurred babbling seems to be on the Right lately, I suppose it will take a Democrat or two passing out in the punch bowl before the topic of pickled politicians becomes “fair and balanced” enough to cover in the media.

In the meantime, Obama’s handlers ought to make a note about meeting with the Cocktailhag of the Cactuses:

Breakfast only.  Too drunk by lunch.

Asked what he would do as president if he found out Castro had died, Romney said he would first “thank heavens” that the revolutionary had “returned to his maker”, to which Gingrich replied: “I don’t think Fidel’s going to meet his maker. I think he’s going to go to the other place.”

Well, that settles it.  As a former, rather than converted, Catholic, I know this particular construction quite well.  We Catholics are taught to believe that if we aren’t quite Heaven’s CEO, we’re at least pretty high up in its HR department, and can accurately guess who’s going to be promoted, as it were, and who’s getting the boot.  Shortly after the (not soon enough) death of my crazy grandmother, Etta, our family found ourselves sharing stories of her many exploits.  Suddenly nervous, my younger brother Turd asked whether Etta could “hear us from Heaven.”  My mother, Joan, replied simply, “Or the other place.”  Stunned silence was immediately followed by gales of laughter, and permission was thereby granted, if not by anybody ordained, the Monsignor of our household, to make fun of Etta all we wanted.  God was on our side.

In that regard, Newt has a point; like Etta, Fidel is a narcissistic boob who has caused much misery with his megalomania and unchecked authoritarianism.  It’s highly unlikely St. Peter will be lighting his cigar any time soon.  Unlike Etta, though, Fidel has a rather firm grasp on reality; he has ruled a country for a half century, and survived a whole Cold War’s worth of devious machinations from the superpowers.  Etta, on the other hand, had a much smaller sphere of influence.  She was the Beast of Brazee Street, admittedly, but was continually stymied when she wanted to bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation for one reason or the other.  That sort of thing was way above her pay grade.  She could rail against the Commies and the Unions until she turned blue (which was often),  but her stamp on geopolitics remained frustratingly faint; God was much more likely to notice, and perhaps think about smiting, Fidel before he ever bothered about Etta.  He did decide to get rid of her in 1980, and Fidel lives on, which is surely evidence of a divine hand on the rudder.  But then God, being omniscient and all, might also have heard this:

“The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is – and I mean this seriously – the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been,” he (Fidel) wrote.

At this point, if I were God, I’d maybe start thinking that this guy maybe doesn’t need to join Etta across the River Styx.  After all, He did go to a lot of effort, albeit only occasionally successfully, to give us brains, and ol’ Fidel seems to be still using his, while Etta tossed hers out in a way she would never have with, say,  a 30-year old pair of shoes.

Despite whatever Newt says, I’m relatively confident that he hasn’t the least idea whether others are going to Heaven or “the other place.”   Indeed, maybe God will take one look at Callista’s hair and send them both to the Lake of Fire.  As for Etta, I’d suggest that she put on her lipstick; Newt’s about to show up.  I hope it’s soon.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” said the diplomat. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

Well, then.  The “diplomat,” who doesn’t sound particularly diplomatic to me, is Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to the EU.  Earlier, in response to Iran’s hardly surprising threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to even stiffer sanctions, he said this:

“The strait of Hormuz needs to remain open and we need to maintain this as an international passageway,” he told the BBC. “We will do what needs to be done to ensure that is the case.”

Of course, Daalder justifies such acts of war against Iran because of its still-hypothetical nuclear program, and the force of the related “Killin’ Habibs for Jesus” foreign policy from George Bush and Fox News that Obama has eagerly adopted for his own.  No matter the vast majorities of Americans opposed to any more wars, the Hope and Change campaign is in an election year, which means, ironically, no Hope and no Change, when it comes to chicken-hawkery.

Since no other American media figure will do so, with the notable exception of Glenn Greenwald and a few others, let’s look at this, just for a moment, from Iran’s perspective, if only hypothetically:

CHNN: So, Abdul, why do all you dusky-hued sand niggers want nukes?

ABDUL: So you fat whiteys won’t bomb us and steal our oil.

CHNN:  That couldn’t possibly be the reason.  Isn’t it really because you hate our freedoms?

ABDUL:  What freedoms?

CHNN:  Never mind about that.  Next, we go to Pamela Geller….

It’s useless.  Now that “American Exceptionalism” has become our national religion, even the ostensibly “liberal” politician pretending to be president must beat the war drums until we as a nation are left limbless and caterwauling like the guy in the Monty Python movie.  Unlike politicians, ordinary people can see that we never “win” wars, we just have them, and pay for them with our futures.  And unlike media stars who “cover” our overlords, we actually care if their ballooning expenses are bankrupting us.  Sadly, wars, like every other major decision we as a country make, have been moved upstairs, and nobody has any say in the matter except those who profit from them.  Democrat, Republican, it doesn’t matter; the latter will loudly demand more wars and more money for them, while the former will do so too, only more, uh, diplomatically.

One dreadful consequence of the current Republican disarray, for ordinary people anyway, is that it leaves Obama free to pick useless, unwinnable fights hither and yon while everyone’s busy snickering at his opponents.  The worst is that nobody cares, and why would they?

Orwell must be rolling over in his grave.

Back in 2004 I was working on a house in Irvington, and a neighbor dropped by to chat.  A loquacious gal, she had soon informed me that her elderly father had been moved to a nursing home, so she and her husband planned to fix up his house and move in; it was just down the street, would I like to take a look?  I eagerly followed her down the leafy, lovely street of beautiful old houses, looking forward to some good snooping, if not necessarily paid employment.  The house seemed ordinary enough from the front, a modest arts and crafts style bungalow,  painted barn red. It looked a little overgrown and shabby, but I could see it was still a very good house.  Then we went inside.

Her father was quite evidently a hoarder, and worse, one with a predilection to undertake weird engineering experiments, like cutting holes in the roof for convenient adjustment of the TV aerial.  We make fun of Tonya Harding for throwing a hubcap at her boyfriend in her living room; here she could have gone up and gotten the piece of engine block on the floor in the upstairs hall and finished him off for good.  One of the three bedrooms had been gutted by fire in the 70′s and never repaired.  There were disturbingly large rat holes in the kitchen and hall that looked just like in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

I knew I had to have this job.  The house was designed by Ellis Lawrence, who created a large number of the city’s great houses, and later became Founding Dean of University of Oregon’s Architecture School.   The best building on that campus, and I had four dreary years to study the matter, is his magnificent Art Museum with its forbidding, monumental  deco-Andalusian facade opening into one of the prettiest, most intimate cloistered courtyards I’ve ever seen in the US.  The guy is good.  And underneath the grime, grease, and rat turds, I saw a lot to like.  Every room had light on two sides, the wide portals that separated the living room from the dining room and entry were works of art, and the heavy wood doors and windows were all original.  It had a back stairway into the kitchen, ingeniously lit by stepped casement windows, and unusual and charming cabinetry and woodwork throughout, spared by neglect from forty years of gloppy latex paint.

In the end, they did hire me, and I remodeled the kitchen, bathroom, and the infamous burnt-out room, restoring or mimicking original details wherever possible.  Because they were on a tight budget (as you can see by that crummy range they still have…) they stripped the wallpaper themselves, which only led to the discovery that all the plaster was crap, not just the more noticeable collapsed ceilings, and we would therefore need to skim-coat just about everything.  Even had I wanted to do such a thing, they couldn’t afford it, so I taught the husband the mysteries of the mud pan.  And, to my considerable surprise, he took to it like a duck to water, even though during the process he generally looked more like Lucy after that time she got stuck in the deep freeze.

It was the same with the woodwork; after I’d painted the fire-damaged hall and the kitchen and bath, they naturally wanted me to paint the rest, but couldn’t afford that, either.  We agreed that I’d paint the most complicated things, like the portals and cabinetry, and again I’d teach them to paint woodwork themselves.  They learned that, too, evidently; I don’t know how long it took, but all the woodwork was nicely painted when I was there today.

One of the nicest discoveries of this project was the little details that set it apart from even much more extravagant houses of the era; the stuff that distinguishes building from architecture.  The slanted bookcases beneath the stairs, the subtle yet lovely Gothic influences in the china cupboard that remind one that the architect designed churches, too, and the uncomplicated pleasantness of the small but gracious floor plan, were hiding in plain sight; the glass painted over, the driveway a forest of weed trees, and heaps of junk everywhere.

This was part remodeling, part rescue, and I’m most proud of the rescue part.

It’s fairly easy to see how such astonishingly authoritarian, anti-democratic  thinking, worthy of any kleptocratic dictatorship, has become mainstream enough to be casually bandied about by serious presidential candidates.  This imperial disdain for the lower orders has been quite aggressively sold to us by a lazy, insecure, and compromised media owned by some of the world’s most ruthless and degenerate corporations.  Mrs. Alan Greenspan, an ol’ cocktailhag also known as Andrea Mitchell, marveled at how Mitt channeled the the beauty of the mythical Saint Reagan, when, to most observers, he churlishly sneered at an uppity 99%er, “America’s right and you’re wrong.”  Morning in America seems to have, in this case, awakened to a nasty hangover; Mitt may not drink, but releasing those hundred-page tax returns could cause a headache, too.  And it hardly needs mentioning that simultaneously fellating the rich while pissing on the poor (or dead Afghanis, as the case may be…) is the whole point of Fox News; they just throw in the racism and chest-thumping to bring in the rubes.  A good offense is always the best defense with that crowd, and South Carolina seems to have awakened that instinct in the usually robotic Mitt.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand why Americans, especially those on the right, for whom “freedom” and “liberty” are supposedly so sacrosanct, not only acquiesce, but actually cheer, when a few hundred obscenely wealthy people get together and tell their candidate to go out and inform Americans that whatever happened to all the money is simply none of their business.   For a person like Romney, who has lived his life blissfully free from the prying ears and eyes of the little people, it must be deeply annoying to suddenly have to hear the words of a non-underling; no wonder he got so crabby.  For a normal person, however, who has to endure the slings and arrows of everyday existence, I wouldn’t expect such a thing to sell.

But sell it does, and I think the reason is as obvious as it is depressing.  Even in the heyday of the “liberal media,” when media ownership was much more diverse and competitive, both newspapers and TV networks could still often be stymied by powerful and corrupt interests, be they corporate or governmental.  But the governmental ones were, by definition, public, and therefore less completely opaque, so it was less arduous and dangerous to expose their misdeeds.  The corporate ones, on the other hand, are able eschew all accountability,  armed as they are with legions of expensive lawyers and, when that doesn’t work, somewhat less expensive hired thugs.  Sadly, the corporate model is now being adopted by what we used to think of as our democratic government, a bleak coda to an era when corporations became people and actual people became, well, the help.

The last vestige of flesh and blood people having any power great enough to tame gigantic and rapacious corporations, our federal government, has decided, quite recently, to just admit that it isn’t really ours, no matter how much it costs us.   In this sense, Romney is only ratifying what was a “bold” step by President Bush, a “pragmatic” one by President Obama, and by the time Romney came along, Reaganesque:  Corporations are right; we (the people) are wrong.  Glad that’s been cleared up.

Well, who could it have been?

President Obama, naturally.  If ever a politician deserved to lose an election (or had less reason to win one), it’s this guy, to whom the concept of rewarding one’s friends and punishing one’s enemies somehow got lost in the shuffle.  The right wing went nuts over Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek cover story, “Why Are Obama’s Enemies So Stupid?”,  only because they correctly saw their slack-jawed faces in the mirror, but Sullivan actually wrote that Obama’s critics on the left were a bunch of dummies, too.  Really?  Sully trots out as unappreciated successes things Obama had nothing to do with, like ending the Iraq war, along with things he opposes, like more states adopting gay marriage and the growing movement to legalize marijuana.  He also touts the corporate-friendly and deeply unpopular health care reform as though it’s something liberals ought to be doing cartwheels over.

I’m left wondering why Obama’s supporters are so stupid, assuming they exist.  The right hates Obama regardless of what he does; yet he invariably chooses to appease them anyway.  The left hates Obama because of what he does or, just as often, what he doesn’t do, and on this score, he’s nothing if not consistent.  He’s as much of a hippie-puncher as, say, Spiro Agnew, but Village bloviators like Sullivan think hippies should love him anyway, perhaps because they smoke so much pot that they can’t remember what happened yesterday.  Another, wiser Nixonite, John Mitchell put it perfectly when he said to a disillusioned supporter, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

Obama is undoubtedly good at saying things liberals might like; unfortunately he’s also a master at doing things that disappoint when they don’t outright offend.  Worse, the pattern is so predictable at this point that when he does do something marginally good, like, say, postponing approval of the odious Keystone XL pipeline, everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that as soon as he’s reelected, that thing will be built so fast it will make your head swim.  Remember when the telecoms were going to be refused immunity for their warrantless spying?  Remember when Gitmo was going to be closed?  For nearly every Bush-like policy he has eagerly embraced, there’s a matching speech about how awful that policy was, when it was someone else’s.

On the outside, Obama’s campaign (I hesitate to call it an administration) appears to think that its serial capitulations to its rabid enemies will make it seem reasonable and post-partisan to “Independents,” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  On the inside, I suspect that they are comfortable in the knowledge that Republicans are unelectable by reason of insanity.  As has been said before, Hope and Change is Obama-ese for We Suck Less.  That’s their strategy, and they’re sticking with it.

Of course, sucking up to business interests that are anathema to liberals is probably wise, given the out-and-out bribery unleashed by Citizens United, but I do think that so doing kisses goodbye to the millions of small donations for which Obama was rightly famous in 2008.  He thinks he can win without us, which may be true, but that doesn’t make it any less dispiriting.

Now, though, the anal excretion that’s soiling Romney’s magic underwear is, you guessed it, Santorum.  It seems that a bunch of butt nuggets affiliated with the smellier regions of the Christian Right, worried that Santorum was, as Politico put it, “slipping behind Gingrich,” had a confab, perhaps in a restroom, in Texas.  These worthies, including but(t) not limited to Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, James Dobson and others, decided that it was time to, well, cover Santorum’s ass before Romney wiped him up once and for all.

This can’t be good news for a candidate who hoped to leave his “moderate” past, wherein he kind of gave a pass to pillow-biters and allowed more Massachusetts residents to have prostate exams, uh, behind.  Other steaming piles, like his Bain Capital career and unprecedented refusal to release his tax returns, continue to dot the landscape, creating a stinky minefield for him to negotiate in South Carolina, not to mention the larger slice of the Old Confederacy he will have to tiptoe through on Super Tuesday.  Gucci loafers are notoriously inadequate footwear for such perilous terrain.

Further, since all of his statements against Obama seem to be pulled directly from his ass, as Paul Krugman ably, if so far ineffectually pointed out today, he is more vulnerable than ever to charges that since he smelt it, he undoubtedly dealt it.

We might find out differently on Tuesday, but from where I sit (not so broken-hearted) this isn’t what I’d call the sweet smell of success.