Media

OOPS LOG Opens Euphemism Wing After Fascist March Gets Filed Under Messy Democracy

Bob Callahan has archived a decade of media euphemisms, but says the cabinet has now entered the trade at a professional level.

The OOPS LOG has opened a Euphemism Wing after a member of the cabinet described a march of masked white supremacists through the capital as the kind of thing that makes democracy messy, a framing that classifies fascism as a spill.

Bob Callahan has tracked the genre for years and says the ladder is standard: white supremacists become masked marchers, masked marchers become demonstrators, demonstrators become concerned citizens, and concerned citizens become, by the Sunday shows, an untidiness. What impressed him this week was the speed. The march was Saturday. The mop framing arrived Sunday morning.

"Messy is when the dishwasher leaks. This was four hundred guys with shields asking for an ethnostate. I have both in the log now. Different tabs." Bob Callahan

The New Wing

Charter entries include Economic Anxiety, retired after load-bearing service from 2016 through 2019; Spirited Debate; Both Sides Have A Point, which is a structural column and cannot be removed; and now Messy Democracy, filed with an index card reading: the marching is legal, and so is saying what it is.

One cable panel spent eleven minutes discussing whether the marchers' message was extreme without once reading the message aloud. Bob logged the segment under Weather Report Declines To Say Rain.

By late afternoon Bob had cross-referenced the new wing against the permanent collection and confirmed the log's oldest finding: the men in the masks have never needed anyone to launder the brand. Volunteers keep arriving anyway, some of them elected. He finished the sandwich.

Log note: The wing has capacity concerns. Bob has been told this is a metaphor. He has measured the drawer and reports that it is not.