(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
That was then. From Wikipedia:
“Happy Birthday, Mr. President” is a song sung by actress and singer Marilyn Monroe on May 19, 1962, for President John F. Kennedy at a gala held at third Madison Square Garden for his 45th birthday, 10 days before the actual date (May 29). The event was co-hosted by Arthur B. Krim and Anna M. Rosenberg, who sat next to the President during the star-studded event.
Monroe sang the traditional “Happy Birthday to You” lyrics in a sultry, intimate voice, with “Mr. President” inserted as Kennedy’s name. She continued the song with a snippet from the classic 1938 song, “Thanks for the Memory”, for which she had written new lyrics specifically aimed at Kennedy.
Thanks, Mr. President
For all the things you’ve done
The battles that you’ve won
The way you deal with U.S. Steel
And our problems by the ton
We thank you so muchAfterwards, as a large birthday cake was presented to him, President Kennedy came on stage and joked about Monroe’s version of the song, saying, “I can now retire from politics after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way,” alluding to Monroe’s delivery, skintight dress, and image as a sex symbol.
The performance was one of Monroe’s last major public appearances before her death less than three months later on August 4, 1962.
You can watch the tv event on YouTube here: “May 1, 1962: Marilyn Monroe sings “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy”.
This was all astoundingly scandalous: MM presenting herself as the embodiment of female desire and desirability: to be crude about it, as pussy personified (to such a degree that you imagined that if you got at all close to her you could smell her body — and maybe you could have). But then it was common knowledge at the time that among the many men that MM had sex with was, yes, JFK, at least sometimes in the presidential suite at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, where privacy and security were amply provided (remarkably, 30 years after Jack was said to have pronged Marilyn there, my Jacques pronged me there — in the rush of events, we would probably just have enjoyed everyday companionable blow jobs, but Jacques argued that we should be honoring JFK and MM by putting that bed to its intended use. And it was good.)
There’s only one known photo showing JFK and MM together: cropped some here to remove a bit of Robert F. Kennedy’s face:
(#2) Photo taken on May 19, 1962 at a Democratic fund raising event after her infamous rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr President”
MM was notoriously difficult to direct — much of her life was a disorganized mess — but in 1959 Billy Wilder managed to extract a remarkable performance from her in the comic masterpiece Some Like It Hot.
And this is now. From Wikipedia:
UFC Freedom 250 (also known as UFC White House and UFC at the White House) was a mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship that took place on June 14, 2026, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., United States. The event’s name is a reference to the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence on the following July 4, 20 days later.
… During a speech at Naval Station Norfolk on October 6, 2025, [our overlord Grabpussy] announced that [the event] would take place on June 14, 2026, coinciding with his 80th birthday and the Flag Day holiday. The rescheduled date drew criticism over its occurrence on [Grabpussy]’s birthday three weeks before July 4.
The poster for UFC Freedom 250:
(#3) With a central image I think of as “A Kiss Before Bashing” — definitely heated rivalry, plenty of subtextual sweaty muscular homoeroticism, all under the cover of brutal poundings presented as a sport embodying masculine power (allusion: Ira Levin’s 1953 novel “A Kiss Before Dying”, filmed in 1956 and in 1991)
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, have you been to a bullfight?)
xx
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