This is an odd book to be reading right now. A collection of columns from a political journalist, mostly focused on Texan politics in the 1980s and the 1990s. I suspect it would be funnier if I knew the people she was talking about, but it's still entertaining, and Ivins writes in a fond, relaxed, insulting style that pulls very few punches towards the hapless idiots of her state legislature. And yeah, it's amusing, but reading this at the time when Fucking Trump - a creature more vacuum than man, with all the substance of a spray-painted meringue and none of the meringue's intelligence - has nearly been re-elected President, well... As a non-American who lives on the other side of the world, it can be hard to understand the decisions of the American electorate. Then I read this and realised that parts of that electorate had been electing morons all along. I mean seriously, some of the politicians that Ivins describes in this... they are stupid and corrupt on a level at which I have frankly never seen before. Even allowing for exaggeration, both Ivins and my own, I still think I've experimented on some slightly smarter seaweeds in my time. The seaweeds were likely also more honest.

I just don't understand how voters put up with this shit. But clearly they do, and there's decades of form if Ivins is to be believed. No wonder she leans so hard into humour. It's either that or cry.