S2. Chapter 31: Stupid Bloody Tuesday

Lloyd Dobler confronts a moment where war is scheduled like a media event and violence is packaged like content. Drawing from Chapter 31 of the Tao Te Ching, this episode examines what happens when escalation becomes normalized—and how quickly the extraordinary becomes routine.

Through a mix of Taoist philosophy, political satire, and unexpected companions like John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” and Ram Dass, Lloyd interrogates the line between “us” and “them.” This episode isn’t about what happened at 8 PM on a Tuesday.

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• Full transcript

  Welcome back for chapter 31. 
  
  If you woke up this morning with a sneaking suspicion that John Lennon’s lyrics from the Beatles song “I am the Walrus” hold the key to unlock our understanding of Donald Trump’s Truth social war crimes threats, this is the podcast episode for you. And if you woke up this morning sleepwalking through your routine just a little numb to the escalating tension of the Trump regime, and then found yourself pissed off at the person meandering on the sidewalk while you have places to be godddamit, and you need a gentle reminder that your anger at the meandering sidewalk sloth is only manifesting because you know that the children of the future will be asking us what, beyond the occasional No Kings March, we did to stop Trump…. Then this podcast might just be for you. But if you woke up and your name is Pete Hegseth or Stephen Miller or Donald Trump, then please just go shove a crucifix-shaped cactus up your a-hole.
  
  HI, I’m Lloyd Dobler, and welcome to the Tao of Lloyd: a podcast where I take the Tao Te Ching, one chapter at a time, and use it as a lens through which to comprehend the late-stage everything moment that we are in right now.
  
  As I write this episode, our President has put Iran on the clock. In a social media post, Trump said, and I quote: Tuesday will be power plant day, and bridge day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ straight, you crazy basterds, or you'll be living in hell—just watch! Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump.”
  
  In a future post trump clarified that the deadline will be 8:00 PM on Tuesday, and it's the nature of a podcast project like this that most people listening will be listening after that deadline has come and gone so you will know whether or not Donald Trump has ordered US fighter pilots to commit war crimes which is what bombing infrastructure of a nation would be or if he has TACO’D again and moved the goal posts or something else, some third option nobody had on their bingo card, because that’s the thing about living inside a slow-motion crisis: the plot keeps mutating, but the pattern doesn’t.
  
  So this is real.

  This isn’t satire.
  This isn’t a sketch.
  This is the sitting president of the United States
  Donald J. Trump
  posting like he’s promoting Wrestle Mania: Geopolitics Edition.

  Like, civilian infrastructure is a Marvel crossover event.

  And now there’s a deadline.

  Tuesday, 8 PM.
  
  Stupid Bloody Tuesday. 

  Which is why this episode still matters, no matter when you listen—because it’s not really about what he did at 8 PM on a Tuesday. It’s about what this moment does to us. How it trains us to normalize threats, to turn violence into content, to pick enemies and call it clarity. And how, if we’re not paying attention, we start to mirror the very thing we say we’re resisting.
  
  We’re either in the sequel,
  the fake-out ending,
  Or the director’s cut, where everything somehow gets worse

  And I can feel my brain doing its thing.

  Sorting.

  Labeling.

  Ah Trump? This fucking guy? Villain.

  Cartoon-level villain.

  Like if a used car dealership and a Bond villain had a baby and raised it on white grievance, Jerry Springer reruns, and an endless supply of (sung) “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.”
  
  Easy.

  Clean.

  Comforting.

  Except…

  hold on.

  Because the second I say that—

  The second I turn him into that—

  I’ve done the exact same thing he’s doing.

  He’s got Iran as “the enemy.”

  And I’ve got Trump as my enemy.

  And now we’re off.

  Everyone’s got an enemy.

  Everyone’s righteous.

  Everyone’s locked in.

  And Ram Dass is somewhere in the background like a stoned ghost at a yoga retreat, going,

  “Hey man… you might want to take a look at that.”

  Because the inconvenient teaching, the one nobody puts on a bumper sticker, is:

  We’re all the same thing wearing different costumes.

  God in drag.
  
  Or, as John Lennon sings in I Am the Walrus:
  I am he
  As you are he
  As you are me 
  And we are all together 
  
  Which means clearly, either:

  a. John Lennon was a time-traveling Zen punk who took one look at 2026, clocked a spray-tanned game-show emperor threatening “Power Plant Day” like it’s a two-for-one apocalypse flash sale, and went, “Perfect! I’ll smuggle the whole diagnosis into a kaleidoscopic fever-dream lullaby, lace it with nonsense that isn’t nonsense, and let some half-baked Gen X meditation podcaster named Lloyd try to decode it while the empire live-streams its own nervous breakdown.”

  b. the Beatles accidentally built a lyrical Mad Lib machine for late-stage collapse—just drop in one reality show con artist, two crumbling institutions, a handful of defense contractors, and Patridge in a pear tree of algorithmic outrage, shake it like a snow globe full of broken headlines, and out comes a perfect little prophecy you can dance to while the world quietly catches fire,

  or…

  c. he was pointing at something way less convenient and way more real
  that the line between “us” and “them” is thinner than we want it to be…
  that the same consciousness looking out through your eyes is looking out through his…
  and that if we can’t see that—if we can’t hold that—even as we resist what’s happening…

  Then we’re not actually breaking the pattern.

  We’re just remixing it.
  
  Which brings us back to Lennon. John, not Vladimir.
  singing:

  “Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday…”

  Okay—hold on.

  Because now we’ve got a president—
  Donald J. Trump—
  literally putting war on the calendar.

  Tuesday, 8 PM.

  Like it’s a product drop, now streaming. Stupid Bloody Tuesday. 

  And “Corporation T-shirt”?

  That’s what it looks like when power becomes branding, and what is Trump if not a brand?

  And yeah… I want to say he’s wearing it.

  But every time I scroll this, it's like it’s content:

  …I’m wearing it too.
  
  “I am the egg man…
  they are the egg men…
  I am the Walrus.”

  Everybody’s got a role.

  Everybody’s got a costume.

  The leader.
  The critic.
  The resistor.
  The guy with the podcast trying to explain it all.

  Egg men.

  All of us.
  
  And all of the king's horses, and all of the king's men, won’t be able to put us back together again.
  
  And with that, let's settle in for the Tao reading and a little meditation.
  
  (bell chime) 
  Close your eyes, and start the journey within.
  Or don’t. I mean, I’m not your spiritual advisor.
  But really, what have you got to lose? 
  
  Unless you are stealing the Nuclear briefcase away from the white house, shutting down a weapons manufacturer, or trying to return an email from a colleague that starts with “Just circling back…” without throwing your work-issued MacBook Air through a window… just close your eyes to start the journey within

  Take a long, slow, deep breath in through the nose…
  … and let it go, like your hot breath could melt ICE.
  the agency, not water molecules locked into a rigid hexagonal lattice by hydrogen bonding.

  Good.
  
  This is chapter 31 of the Tao Te Ching.
  
  Weapons are the tools of violence; 
  all decent men detest them.

  Weapons are the tools of fear; 
  a decent man will avoid them 
  except in the direst necessity
  and, if compelled, will use them 
  only with the utmost restraint.
  Peace is his highest value.
  If the peace has been shattered, 
  how can he be content?
  His enemies are not demons, 
  but human beings like himself.
  He doesn’t wish them personal harm. 
  Nor does he rejoice in victory.
  How could he rejoice in victory
  and delight in the slaughter of men? 
  
  He enters a battle gravely 
  with sorrow and with great compassion, 
  as if he were attending a funeral.
  
  Okay.

  So that’s Lao Tzu.

  Two thousand five hundred years ago, basically saying:

  If you have to use force…
  you do it like you’re attending a funeral.

  Not a rally.
  Not a brand activation.
  Not “Power Plant Day threat from the president, and I think the problem is how fast we metabolize it.

  How quickly something unthinkable
  becomes… Tuesday.
  
  Stupid Bloody Tuesday.

  How a threat turns into a headline,
  then a take,
  then a scroll,
  then background noise
  while you’re deciding what to have for lunch.

  And “Power Plant Day”
  sounds like a thing that just… happens.

  And yeah, I still feel the pull:

  To make Trump the villain.
  To make this clean.
  To draw the line nice and thick and permanent.

  But the Tao keeps dissolving the line.

  Ram Dass keeps dissolving the line.

  And Lennon…

  Lennon just blows it up completely.

  “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together…”

  And then, remember at the end of the song, when the Beatles were fuckin with us with those backward messages, we hear: 

  “John is really dead.”

  It’s the reminder that underneath all the wordplay,
  all the roles,
  all the egg men and walruses and kings and enemies—

  this ends.

  In a body.

  Not metaphorically.

  Not politically.

  Not rhetorically.

  Really.

  So when Lao Tzu says: “enter the battlefield like a funeral,” he’s not being poetic.

  He’s being literal.

  This is about bodies.

  So wherever this landed

  whatever Tuesday became

  this is the practice:

  Stay awake to the cost.

  Because “stupid bloody Tuesday” isn’t absurd.

  It’s a day someone doesn’t come back from.
  
  And I’ll see you next time, for chapter 32. 

  [pause]

  From the edge of empire…
  and the center of self—this is The Tao of Lloyd.

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