A word to the Berniacs

“You’re being ridiculous.” So said Sarah Silverman to her fellow Sanders delegates the other day and while I would probably agree with anything Sarah Silverman says—I will admit to a strong attraction to good-looking Jewish girls with potty mouths and big breasts (yes, I am that shallow)—in this case she is right: you are being ridiculous. I knew this months ago, when Bernie Sanders didn’t want to talk about Hillary’s damn emails. No serious candidate for any office throws away an important issue like that unless that candidate is not, in fact, serious. I hate to point this out to all of you Berniacs, but the only person in your crusade who wasn’t feeling the Bern was Bernie. He knew it was a con all along.

So let me tell you Berniacs what the deal was here. Simply put, the fix was in. The fix was in from the start. Hillary and her machine made sure of that. There was never going to be a serious challenge to Hillary. The Clintonistas scared off any other Democrat who might have thought this was a good year to run and then imported Bernie, who wasn’t even a Democrat when the campaign started and has, now that he’s out of it, become an independent yet again.  The role of the Democratic National Conference in this election was to make sure no one threatened Hillary’s chances of getting the nomination, not to be a neutral observer of the people’s will. If you Berniacs thought the DNC was shortchanging your guy’s campaign, then you were right: they were. Hillary has had eight years to plan for this moment and she wasn’t going to let another Obama come out of left field and screw her out of what she thinks she’s entitled to for a lifetime of putting up with Bill’s bimbo eruptions.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz was put in charge of the DNC to make sure nothing got in the way of Hillary’s ambitions and she did her job. Hillary has the nomination and Bernie is going back to Vermont with whatever the Clintons promised him as a payoff. That Debbie got caught in the backlash of the DNC hack scandal is certainly not a great thing for her personally, but for Hillary, Debbie is just one more casualty on her road back to the White House. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, comrades, everyone knows that. 

And now you have Hillary. You must learn to love Hillary, or if you cannot love her, then you must support her in order to keep Trump out of the White House.  You must keep Mick Jagger’s words in your mind, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you can get what you need, or at least, you can get what you need as Hillary defines it.  You must put away your doubts and love Hillary. I know it feels like a betrayal, largely because it is, and I must admit that I feel sorry for you guys, I really do. You are the poor misguided virgin who trusts her boyfriend to slip on a condom just before the cherryectomy, only to discover afterwards that the boyfriend lied about having one. So there you are without your pants on, with a cootch full of his baby batter and wondering, oh my God, what have I done?  Now, you may or may not get pregnant from this great misadventure; chances are you probably won’t, but it does happen, which is why you should have made sure he was wearing the rubber before he got close to you; but what is also true is that from no matter what angle you choose to look at it, you’ve been screwed in more ways than one.  Welcome to the real world, Berniacs.

Just my opinion, you understand, your mileage may vary

Many years ago,[1] I watched the Oprah Winfrey Show[2] and there I saw Oprah dressed in her pajamas along with the late Maya Angelou. They were discussing relationships and in the usual chit and chat that goes on about this sort of thing, Ms. Angelou said something that has stuck with me ever since.  She told Oprah that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.  If a man tells you that he is cruel or mean or incapable of loyalty, then believe him, Ms. Angelou said; they know themselves better than you ever will. It seems to me that this is a wonderful piece of advice, not merely for dealing with interpersonal relationships, but for international relationships as well.  Today, the former junior Senator from Illinois is proposing a treaty with the Islamic Republic of Iran that will give that nation, assuming they do not cheat, the ability to construct a nuclear weapon in ten years’ time.  The former junior Senator from Illinois is throwing considerable amounts of political capital into pushing this treaty through Congress, although he himself will not call it a treaty, as doing so would require a two-thirds vote from the Senate, and he doesn’t have the votes to do this. Should it pass, however, he will act as though it were a treaty, so I suppose the difference between the two words is trifling.  We are already getting a foretaste of what will happen if it does not; not since St. John Chrysostom’s homilies in the fourth century has Jew-baiting been so eloquent.  When people who support him and his treaty think that his recent speeches on the subject sound remarkably like something one might hear at a white power rally, then the former junior Senator from Illinois has passed a red line that he should not pass.

And what is the object of all of this hubbub? A deal with a regime that predicates its existence on its hatred for the United States and Israel in particular and the West in general, that has committed numerous acts of terrorism, that seized an American embassy and held (and still holds) American citizens hostage, a regime that the State Department calls the number one sponsor of terrorism in the world today; these are the people we are dealing with.  And why?  Because the Iranians are going nuclear and this administration does not want to stop them.  They do not want to stop the Iranians because the only real way to stop them is by force or by regime change through covert action, and this administration does not want to use force or covert action. Having removed the only two real ways to prevent this disaster, the administration must pin its hopes on a piece of paper and convince as many people as possible that this piece of paper has some actual merit.  

 In reality, the only thing this agreement does is guarantee that when Iran does go nuclear, our Illinois Incitatus will no longer be in office and then can blame its failure on almost everyone except himself. I strongly suspect that our fearless leader will be as ungracious with his successors as he was with his predecessor.  Again, and why is that?  Because nothing is ever his fault, because something being his fault would disturb his self-image, and nothing and no one will ever be allowed to disturb his self-image.  Therefore, he makes deals with people who mock him even as he gets ready to do their bidding and insults those who are trying to save him from committing a massive mistake. In short, his ego is getting in the way of what Ms. Angelou pointed out back in the 1990’s.  The Iranians are showing everyone who and what they are and anyone with any sense believes them when they spew their hatred at us.  Only the former junior Senator from Illinois and his true believers do not, but then, they are not the ones who will have to deal with the consequences of this agreement, are they?

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[1] Well, maybe not that many years ago, as years go. When you get to my age, years seem to zoom by.

[2] I think I was sick that day.

More excuses, except without the nice picture of Emily.

Okay, so here’s the thing: I do have some stuff to post, but the pieces (there are two of them, you know, but they are not about the same thing, which makes them fraternal twins, I suppose) are not ready for prime time. In short, I have not finished either one of them and I have used a great deal of psychic energy these past few weeks justifying to myself why I have not finished them.  I could blame George W. Bush, but I started both of these pieces several years after Bush left the Presidency, although, if the newspapers are anything to go by, incumbency is not a requirement for things to be George W. Bush’s fault. But I can’t, not really, a result, I think, of long years of Roman Catholic teaching. The well-developed Catholic conscience understands that blaming others for one’s own faults is the oldest sin in the Book, other than eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that Adam's excuse that she made me, and Eve's excuse that the serpent made her, does not excuse either one of them at all. So it is not George W. Bush’s fault that I have not been posting as much as I should, much as I would like to say otherwise.

My desultory posting is also not the fault of my brother and his potato salad, even if I am certain beyond a reasonable doubt that he gave me that potato salad in order to poison me.  In the cold salad realm, I have always been partial to macaroni salad, especially my mother’s macaroni salad. Unlike so many people, including my brother, my mother does not annoy the palate with a multitude of flavors. There’s vinegar and mayonnaise, some tomatoes and celery, which I pick out of the salad and throw to the nearest cat, and macaroni. Simple, basic, filling, all the things I want in a cold salad. My brother, on the other hand, is a pupil of the more is better culinary school, and in his potato salad there are potatoes that you cannot taste and every manner of spice that you can, sort of, when those spices are not fighting for space and attention on your taste buds.  In short, I hate my brother’s potato salad and I would not eat the ghastly stuff at all except that my mother values family peace over almost everything else, especially at family get-togethers, and so in the interest of peace and brotherhood and good will I ate my brother’s potato salad and quickly came down with a nasty case of food poisoning.  As you might imagine, my brother did not like my accusing him of attempted murder nor did he appreciate my calling his potato salad loathsome noisome swill. All right, I didn’t use those words exactly, but I am sure you get the point. My brother certainly did and he certainly didn’t like it. Some people get very defensive about their potato salad and my brother is one of those people. In his defense, however, I should point out that my refusal to buckle down and start writing pre-dated his attempted fratricide for quite a while, and so, in the interests of truth and fair play and all sorts of other virtues Americans hold sacred, I cannot blame him for my unswerving loyalty to procrastination as a virtue.  I still hate his potato salad, though.

What I do blame for all the delay is my recent commitment to lemur ranching for fun and profit.  Ranching on a spread filled with ring-tailed lemurs is something that can drive a grown man to Despair, which, people tell me, is a pretty upscale new French bar and grill here in our happy little burg.  I didn’t know that the French had bars and grills; none of those bistros you see in the travel brochures ever look like what I’d consider to be a bar and grill, but then I don’t get out much. The food is very nice though, if you like overly intellectualized hamburger. Contrary to what you might have heard, the cow involved is not having an existential crisis as a response to its search for meaning in a meaningless world; the cow has passed from being to nothingness by becoming hamburger. Ergo, the cow has solved its existential crisis by finding the meaning denied to so many human beings. For the cow, the purpose of existence is simple: it is dinner.  That the cow is no longer in a position to grasp this elegant solution to its existential problem simply demonstrates the inadequacy of any overarching philosophical system when that system confronts reality. And steak tastes good.

I don’t know what the lemurs taste like and I don’t intend to find out. I’m not raising them for food, at least not for people, and I don’t think the furry little bastards have enough meat on them to interest the pet food manufacturers.  So why bother with lemurs?  Lemur oil will cure a boatload of skin ailments, yes it will, everything from eczema to seborrhea and psoriasis, so step right up and put in your order for your own 12 oz. bottle of Dr. Green’s Old Fashioned Green Lemur Miracle Oil and if you order within the next ten minutes I will be happy to send you another bottle absolutely free; just pay shipping and handling. And then I sit and watch the money roll in, or I would, if only get the ornery little beasts to stay still for long enough to press some oil out of them.  Lemurs object to pressing, for reasons I am not sure I fathom—a consequence of poor parenting and equally poor socialization in the public schools seems a reasonable hypothesis—and while I am not pressing them the lemurs insist on three meals a day and a roof over their heads, which makes them seem less an investment than members of my family.  In addition to this, I have the Department of Agriculture inspectors going over every inch of my operation and the Humane Society and every other animal rights group in the country camped out in my front yard demonstrating against my pressing the lemurs at all. The lemurs don’t like the animal rights people very much; one of those PETA people broke into the lemurs’ compound two weeks ago to “liberate” them and the lemurs bit him on his ass for his troubles. Serves him right, too; I hope the bastard gets rabies.

So as you can see, as a small aspiring entrepreneur in the age of the Illinois Incitatus I am up to my backside in money problems and government red tape and high-minded idiots who don’t know the first thing about lemurs or business trying to tell me how to run my business. I simply do not have the time to whip up these little funny bits regularly. I have things to do, important things, like trying to figure out where the damn lemurs are hiding my pencils. Damn, I hate when they do that; it’s more annoying than you can imagine.

There's glory for you...

I’ve never been a big science fiction fan. I liked the original Star Trek when I was a kid and Star Wars when I was a teenager, but as a genre science fiction has never been something I couldn’t live without. I’ve always been more of a history or biography person; the top shelf of my book case has seventeen books on the American Civil War, which is, when you think about it, sixteen more than I really need. Or, as my mother says, ‘why do you need all those books for, you know who won.’ I bring up all this mostly unnecessary literary throat clearing because one of the best lines I’ve ever read came from a sci-fi novel a friend loaned to me when I was in high school, which was probably the first and last sci-fi novel I ever read. I don’t remember the title or the author’s name, although I do remember that it had an orange cover and was about an interstellar war between humans and an extraterrestrial race that looked like walruses or manatees or some other large and aquatic mammal. In the novel, the official language of Earth is Spanish (it could happen) and the politicians ruling the Earth in our Hispanophonic future did not want to call the war they were fighting against the hordes of evil extraterrestrial walruses a war. No, these politicians called their politics implemented by other means the emergency or the unpleasantness or something to that effect, something very bland and bureaucratic that could mean a war or a traffic accident on Interstate 84 or that the sea turtles were staging a mass break from the local aquarium. The politicians did not like to use the word war because, the author wrote, certain words bring with them inevitable commitments with unknowable results, and as politicians both in science fiction and in real life dislike inevitable commitments with unknowable consequences, it was best for all involved to avoid using those words at all.

I bring up this bit of semantic parsing because semantic parsing is all the rage in the pestilential swamp that serves as the capital of this our Great Republic. The people there can parse a perfectly good sentence into tiny bits faster than Emeril LaGasse can chop an onion, except when Emeril chops an onion what’s chopped still tastes like an onion. The whole point of parsing in M. L’Enfant’s dream city is to reduce the meaning of words to whatever some political Humpty-Dumpty wants them to mean.  For example, the minions of the former junior Senator from Illinois have determined that He is angry at someone, angry enough to blow these anonymous someones to kingdom come via remote control, but they will not tell the citizenry just who these nameless evildoers are. Now, I am not sure of the details here—I don’t get out much, you see—but it appears to me that the question of motivation is very important to our Illinois Incitatus and His flacks, very important indeed, especially when He and His flacks wish to make it perfectly clear that the nameless evildoers in the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia are not committing the crimes they are committing for the reasons they say they are committing these crimes, but for some other reason altogether, a reason completely unrelated to the Islamic faith, and the flacks will parse any sentence that might suggest otherwise to complete and utter pulp. This seems a little odd to me; I would not have thought that a government full of secular humanists and nominal Christians would be such experts on the finer points of Islamic theology, but stranger things have happened, you know. I had a co-worker several years ago who took investment advice from his parrot—the bird thought the world of Treasury bills and municipal bonds, if you’re interested in that sort of thing—and he has done very well for himself (the former co-worker, not the parrot, who can only enjoy the fruits of his or her financial acumen vicariously, again proving, as if it needed proving, the remunerative utility of the opposable thumb). So it could happen. Really. I’m not making that up.

We must, the solonic classes tell us again and again, address the root causes of the extreme violence occurring against Jews, Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, and the more than occasional sundry others who happen to be in the neighborhood when some people are overcome with the need to kill, maim, rape, and pillage gets the better of their moral sense. In dealing with these poor murderous wretches, we must not call them names that imply that they are acting in the name of their religious beliefs, which they are not, but we should use a name that is nonsectarian and inoffensive to all. Well, that is all very understandable, I suppose, and therefore I move, Mr. Chairman, that from this point forward we here in the West refer to this mob of pillaging scum as calf’s liver.  In calling them calf’s liver we avoid confusing the good Muslims with the doubleplusungood Muslims and we avoid even suggesting that certain Muslims, especially the doubleplusungood Muslims, have a tendency to go overboard in following the tenets of their faith or even imply that Islam as a faith might in any way be a tad more hostile to the filthy infidel sons of apes and pigs who do not profess the truth of the Prophet’s message, PCBs upon him. No, indeed, I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that damn near everyone hates calf’s liver and can do so in good conscience.

And who will find our declaration of official hostility towards calf’s liver offensive?  Calves?  I hardly think so; the calves are dead and therefore hardly in any position to take any kind of offense. I’m sure that given a choice the calves would prefer to have their livers back and be frolicking through an open field somewhere doing whatever it is that calves do before their inevitable conversion into veal parmigiana, but most of life is finding out that you don’t really have a choice in the matter; when it’s your turn to go, it’s your turn to go, period.  That’s just the way it is, as the song goes, some things will never change.

The Benchley Memorandum, not by Robert Ludlum

For reasons I am not sure I fathom, the following thought popped into my mind last night. Maybe it was the asparagus that caused the popping; I dislike asparagus intensely and I only ate the slimy things last night because my mother cooked them. I should point out that my mother refuses to believe that the usual regimen of Honey Nut Cheerios, sausage pizza, and sugar-free orange Jello constitutes a healthy diet and routinely demands that I eat something green, if only to demonstrate some ethnic pride every so often.  As I prefer my meals without the slightly bile flavor of maternal nagging, I gave in and ate some of Mom’s asparagus. It being late, I promptly went to bed.

This was not such a good idea; sleeping with the asparagus working its way through the old organism caused no end of restlessness and bad dreams, and as I awoke this morning the following thought popped into my still exhausted brain: the former junior senator from Illinois is the Robert Benchley of American politics, sideways, sort of. The thought seemed strange at the time; I usually think of Himself as the Jackson Pollock of American politics, which is to say, a man utterly untalented at his chosen profession whose stellar reputation large numbers of people support because admitting that He is utterly untalented at His chosen profession makes them look very stupid.  After all, what is the difference between Lavender Mist and the drop cloth Joe the Painter puts down on the floor when he paints your kitchen that stupid shade of lavender your significant other insists upon because lavender is so restful? Not much really, other than the large pile of filthy lucre it takes to buy Lavender Mist. And once you’ve parted with that much loot for a painting, then the artist is going to be the greatest thing since beer in a can. He (or she; let’s not be sexist here) just is. Absolutely no two ways about it. 

But how is our Illinois Incitatus the second coming of Robert Benchley? Benchley seems to be an unlikely candidate for a solonic avatar. Benchley was a real mensch, whereas Himself is many things, but a mensch is not one of them. Benchley was funny and self-deprecating, whereas Himself is not funny without His teleprompter (most of the time, anyway) and wouldn’t know what self-deprecation was if it bit Him on the backside. Benchley was famously at war with the technology of the Industrial Age, while our prairie solon wields the new digital technology in the same way that Merlin the Wizard wielded his magic wand.

So how is He like Robert Benchley, sideways, sort of? “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous,” said Mr. Benchley (maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; all funny remarks whose provenance are not completely clear are, in the United States, attributed to Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, or Anonymous, in that order).  The former junior senator from Illinois deeply resembles that remark, I think, in that by the time the rest of us discovered he had no real capacity for governance, He was already President. Of course, the point of the quip is that Benchley discovers after fifteen years of working the writer’s trade that he has no talent for writing, which realization depends on a certain amount of self-knowledge, whereas I am certain that the occupant or current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue thinks He’s doing a wonderful job doing whatever it is He thinks He’s doing these days and no one around Him is going to tell Him any different.  In any case, I think I will stop eating the damn asparagus after eight o’clock at night; it clearly doesn’t agree with me.

My way or the highway

This remark from the former junior senator from Illinois intrigues me. He made it the day after his party suffered a wallopingly bad defeat at the polls: “To everyone who voted, I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.”  Now, as a proud scion of the Cook County Democratic machine, our prairie solon is familiar with the idea of representing people who are not really there. After all, dying in Cook County presents the deceased with the choice between heaven, hell, and purgatory—this last does not apply if you are not Roman Catholic—and mandatory induction into the Democratic Party; you may avoid two out of the three previous fates, although you can get to heaven from purgatory eventually, but that last one, I fear, is unavoidable.   The dead are a solidly Democratic voting bloc. 

So it is with this in mind that the Seigneur de Bourbon made his announcement. Since the two-thirds that didn’t vote clearly outnumber the one-third that did, he must champion the causes of the majority non-voters as opposed to the minority voters, who are clearly too stupid to understand what is good for them.  In short, his fingers are in his ears and he’s not listening to anything he don’t wanna listen to and you can’t make him, even if you go home and tell your mother. So there, take that, you Republican racist snotwads!