Greetings and welcome to this 82nd performance of the Carnival of Fools! It’s a ragged crew of entertainers on call for this week, as we all ponder from the safety of our couches whether Donald Trump’s experimental war on Iran will actually result in regime change or whether we’ll be shipping out soon to stage USO performances of the Carnival for our brave soldiers and sailors about to occupy Kharg Island. Normally I might be concerned about putting boots on the ground, but a job is a job: I’m working on convincing Nancy Mace and Jasmine Crockett to join up for our tour as their own morale-boosting side act — I envision a combination of CNN’s old Crossfire and the WWE’s Monday Night Raw — and I actually think the Carnival will travel pretty well.
Until then — and because I already plan to discuss my thoughts on the progress in Iran elsewhere — it’s time for a surprisingly breezy trash-picking jaunt through the domestic detritus of the week.
The Gerontocracy of Public Protest
Saturday’s nationwide “No Kings” rally descended on Chicago like a long-anticipated cicada bloom that I have no excuse for not planning around. I ignored all the warning signs: the regular public service announcements on NPR that week encouraging my attendance; the sudden disappearance of lunch and dinner reservations at pricey restaurants in the West Loop; the chittering din of septuagenarian Trotskyists and blue-haired grandmothers as they scuttled from their hidey-holes in the North Shore to gather agitatedly in Grant Park.
Yes, “Brood Boomer” reassembled downtown for a reprise of last October’s similarly senior-heavy affair, a “No Kings” protest against — well, what? Deportations of illegals? The potential quagmire of an Iran war? Our cynically mercantilist adventure in Venezuela? That tacky White House ballroom? They were opposed to all of these things, and more — they were opposed to the simple existence of the Trump administration, in all its unanswerable egregiousness.
And why not? Were I a Democrat right now, I’d be pretty miffed about the course of national politics. (I’m a Republican, and I’m not exactly thrilled myself.) It’s America, and everyone has a right to gripe. But all of the observations I made about the demography of the “No Kings” rally-goers back last year applied in redoubled measure to this year’s attending class: These people were overwhelmingly old, white, deeply elite progressives, and vastly fewer in number this second time around.
I didn’t attend the rally personally — the next time I plan to listen to Mayor Brandon Johnson speak is when he delivers his concession speech in February 2027 — but I ran into the subsequent “march” through the Loop afterward. And of course, the inevitable spillover to my neighborhood after the rally and march told the tale: I haven’t seen so many senior citizens in embarrassingly tight-fitting union T-shirts worn overtop long sleeves since I attended the DNC in 2024. I had difficulty spotting anyone my age or younger — and I’m 45.
This is suggestive of something, but I don’t think it has very much to do with the current state of electoral politics. Despite the fading lack of enthusiasm and focus at these anti-Trump rallies, I still expect the Republicans to be walloped upside the head in November. But there is something curiously generational about public protest now — it is intensely “Boomer-coded” and is now done with grim duty, to the commands of political organizers, rather than as a spontaneous expression of discontent. (Behind the marchers you could almost hear the faint cracks of the knout.)
And I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing. The younger generation has many more discontents than their parents do right now, and it’s not as if they lack the appetite for political change themselves. I fear that, in their disillusionment and impatience with the gestural politics of boomers, they prefer more destructive methods.
Twitter Unleashes Japanese Forces of Wholesomeness
I try not to write too much about “purely online” phenomena around here, on the understanding that such things are either meaningless trifles or too sordid to engage with. (I would sooner quaff hemlock than write about the “influencer wars.”) But as a writer — and a writer whose avocation is excavating the tellingly absurd political ephemera and tripe of our era — it’s impossible for me not to “live” professionally on Twitter/X.
And I don’t like it. I keep my personal life out of the Carnival of Fools as a rule, but I’ll break character just for a brief moment to confess that, however much spending time on social media has helped me do my job, it has made me a more miserable person overall. It is a bleak swamp of self-promotion and lies, with increasingly few honest people and a surfeit of grifters peddling lies. (There are also some great jokes.)
Well, for whatever reason, Twitter/X decided a change was in order, so it unleashed the Japanese upon America. It’s Pearl Harbor all over again — if you can imagine squadrons of Zeroes bombing America with kindness, cute animal pictures, and delightfully respectful covers of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” that is.
X’s head developer Nikita Bier explained the change thusly:
If you’re seeing a bunch of Japanese posts, here are some fun facts:
Japan has more daily active users and more time spent on X than any other country in the world.
Over two thirds of the country is monthly active on X.
X in Japan has one of the highest penetration rates of any social network in history.
Well all right, then. I don’t really know or care whether that’s true; I only know that I spent my weekend idly checking Twitter and instead of drowning in antisemitic conspiracy theories and wartime doomerism, I was reading the translated opinions of Japanese tweeters asking to learn about the varieties of American barbecue and posting their own attempts to re-create it. It was in its own way a model cultural exchange — respectful on both sides, enthusiastic even when slightly bemused, and focused (properly) on food most of all. I don’t know why Twitter/X decided to unleash the wholesome Japanese into my online life, but it genuinely felt like a lifeline.
All Hail Major League Baseball’s New Robot Umpire Overlords
I am a baseball traditionalist in almost every way. I retain a fondness for the game of my youth: real leagues, real divisional rivalries — not one NL East team played another NL East team on Opening Day this year, which is absurd — no ghost runners on second, and no designated hitter in the National League. (I’m still bitter about this last one.) But like it or not, baseball has continued to tinker with its rule set in recent decades, and the reasoning is probably wise enough. In a world where baseball is forever in danger of losing market- and mind-share to other sports (look at the plight of the NBA), MLB has been desperate to speed up its often torturously slow gameplay.
And some of the changes have worked! I’ll never forgive the way extra-inning play has been mutilated by Commissioner Rob Manfred, but the pitch clock was an idea that fans had long been begging for, and its implementation has been painless. And now we have an even more joyful innovation: the automated ball-strike system (ABS). Yes, Major League Baseball has finally acquired long-promised “robot umpires,” and they have already made a hugely entertaining and successful debut on opening day weekend.
The robot umps — in reality, a series of cameras that can measure exactly where a baseball is in a batter’s strike zone when it crosses the plate, and which can adjust naturally to different-sized strike zones for different-sized batters — are not used for regular gameplay, at least not yet. Instead, they can be called in only on a challenge by the pitcher, catcher, or batter. And each team has only two chances per game to challenge a call, unless a challenge is successful — so the pressure is on the player not to demand a challenge out of vanity.
The results are already spectacular. First off, we are discovering that many players really do have an instinctive understanding of their strike zones. The monstrously tall Aaron Judge turns out to know exactly what his legal strike zone is, and he won the first-ever ABS challenge on March 27 — then proceeded to swat a homer with the next pitch. Longtime fans are thrilling to micronarratives: The umpiring incompetence of C. B. Bucknor has been the stuff of legend and unrequited grumbling among baseball fans for years, and now we are getting amazing proof of it — redemption, after all these years of unanswered complaints! — in real time.
It’s the rare win-win situation for baseball: The fans love the momentum swings that can come from a successful challenge — listen to the stadium roar in that clip — the process doesn’t slow the game down in any perceptible way, and the losers have no recourse: You can’t fight the computer after all, can you? (On that note, Minnesota Twins manager Derek Shelton went down in MLB history on Sunday as the first person ever to be ejected from a game for raging against the machine.)
Some may be suspicious of change; as a conservative, I’m actually happy to admit that I’m one of them. But as a vehement skeptic of most of the tweaks Major League Baseball has made to the game over the last decade, this one has instantly proven an enormous hit. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Until next week.