When we dead awaken, in this case, not a play by Henrik Ibsen

 

Blarney, the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, is flattery laid on so thin that you couldn’t help but love it, whereas baloney was flattery laid on so thick that you hated it.  And so it is with elections.  A little Chicago-style chicanery here and there livens up the dinner conversation and makes the teller seem dashing and worldly, especially if you don’t live in Chicago and have to live with the consequences of electing and re-electing hordes of grifting and grafting politicians, and causes the Europeans at the dinner table wonder how such an advanced society could tolerate such shenanigans. For example, one can hardly imagine Maximilian Robespierre casting his ballot for Monsieur Macron, Louis XIV seriously contemplating the political ramifications of voting for Marine LePen, or Joan of Arc publicly supporting France staying in the European Union.  And yet here in this our Great Republic, veterans of the Civil War voted for the Democratic Party’s nominee less than two short weeks ago.  I found this bit of news a bit perplexing, given that the last undisputed Civil War veteran, Albert Henry Woolson of the 1^st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment, died in Duluth, Minnesota on August 2^nd, 1956 at the age of 106.  While I think that we must all honor the sacrifices made by the men of the Civil War generation, I do not believe that this homage extends to permitting those same veterans to vote in the 2020 presidential election or even the 1956 presidential election. The question arises, however, if any Confederate veterans voted for the Democratic nominee in Georgia, and if they did, does this make that nominee a racist, an important question in our iconoclastic age.

Here in our happy little burg nothing like this would ever happen.  We live in a safely Democratic state in which nothing untoward ever happens to the Democratic nominee for almost any office you choose to name and therefore no feels the need to stuff the ballot box, except, of course, in municipal elections.  In municipal elections the population of our town awaits with bated breath to find out who Mr. Martin Meehan voted for in this election cycle.  Mr. Meehan was the scion of a lace curtain Irish family—his father was a respectable publican and one of his brothers was a priest and his youngest sister became a nun—but young Martin himself fell in with evil company and became a wastrel, a lout, and an altogether unpleasant young fellow. After his father cut off his allowance, Martin decided to make some money of his own so he could continue his debauched habits.  Not being the sort of person who would ever stoop to or even contemplate actually working for a living, and not being especially bright to begin with, Martin decided to rob a grocery store in the slough of urban despond that lies directly across the river from our happy little burg.

To that end, Martin procured a pistol and a box of bullets.  He fired two bullets for practice and did not hit the empty beer bottle he was aiming at.  Later that day, he crossed the river on the ferry and proceeded to the grocery store, which he then robbed of $12.83.  The owner of the grocery store objected vigorously to Martin robbing him, a trait common to many small tradesmen, whereupon Martin fired two shots at him.  The shots struck the owner of the grocery store in the chest, the man being somewhat larger than an empty beer bottle, and he fell dead to the floor.  Martin, according to the testimony of the eyewitnesses, seemed more than a little nonplussed by this turn of events; apparently he had not given any thought to the possibility of being a murderer as well as a thief; and so dashed out of the grocery store and into the arms of a local constable, who had heard the gunshots and came running. After a brief scuffle, in which the constable broke Martin’s nose and blackened his eye, our heroic flatfoot dragged Martin the two blocks down Broadway to the police station.

Events moved swiftly after that, the judicial system of the time being less constrained than it is nowadays.  Young Martin was found guilty of murder by a jury of his peers and sent up the river, or in Martin’s case, down the river, to a cell in the state’s death house, where he waited a month for the courts and the governor to reject his appeal. Two days after the warden got the bad news from the governor’s office, Martin received the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church from his brother the priest.  The brand-new state electrician and his equally brand-new electric chair then swiftly dispatched Martin onwards into that country from whose bourn no traveler returns, except, it seems, in election years.  Martin was only the third person the state electrician had executed with the device and he was the first person the state electrician had gotten the voltages right with, the two previous occupants of the chair having been more roasted than electrocuted. 

Afterwards, Martin’s parents buried him in St. Thomas’ Cemetery, in the family plot near his great-grandfather, where Martin has remained active in local politics ever since.  To my certain knowledge, Martin Meehan is the most loyal Democrat in the county, having voted in every local, state, and national election since the state shuffled him off this mortal coil in 1912.  I think that it is a good thing for Martin to be so involved in politics, a much more remunerative and altogether safer form of crime for everyone involved than robbing grocery stores.  After all, the present Democratic nominee for president has spent most of his life drawing a government salary and is worth $9 million that we know of.  Martin, I think we can all agree, missed his calling in life.  He would have made a fortune if only he had run for the state assembly, a fortune, I’m telling you!

NOT. MY .PRESIDENT.

 What the title says, not now, not ever. Resist.

POST NUMBER 800, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT: I don’t, as a rule, watch political speeches; if I must pay attention to such things, I prefer to read them in the paper, where the arguments the bloviating pol is making must stand or fall on their merits without the assistance of all the tricks of the rhetorical trade. But I did see the former junior Senator for Illinois’ speech about health care the other day. It was not a terribly interesting speech—just the usual lame rubbish that would insult the intelligence of a dyslexic duck if dyslexic ducks cared about human health care one way or the other—but what I found truly fascinating was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to conduct an aerobics class while the ex-Senator was trying to give his speech and how no one in the mainstream media bothered to report her obstreperous behavior.

No, everyone concentrated on that congressman who yelled, “You lie,” when the former distinguished gentleman from Illinois did, in fact, lay a whopper on the listening public, but mum’s the word about Nancy’s gymnastics class, even though at one point our leader unsuccessfully tried to talk right through one particularly vigorous set of squat thrusts. While I think that it is a good thing that Ms. Pelosi wants to keep the legislative branch slim, trim, and in good health for the legislative battles ahead, and as much as I think some of the people’s tribunes could stand a good workout every now and again, there is a time and a place for everything and I think it behooves Ms. Pelosi to restrict her congressional exercise regimen to the odd morning in the Congressional gym. She is not Jack LaLanne, after all, and I think that such floor exercises are unseemly on national television and only aggravate 1.) the viewing public, who know that the guest of honor is pissing on their legs and telling them it’s raining, and think that solonic aerobics is a damn poor way of distracting their attention, however entertaining watching John Murtha exercise something other than his pork barrel may be, 2.) television executives, who, no matter how much they may love the current Administration, hate losing advertising revenue even more, and 3.) the Vice President of the United States, who looked like he wanted to bludgeon Ms. Pelosi to within an inch of her life with a gavel if she insisted on performing her impression of Jack-in-the-Congress one more time.

It’s just my opinion, of course, but I think the Veep may be on to something there. I’m pretty sure he could get some excellent ratings on Fox or CNN or even MSNBC if he bopped the Speaker over the head with the Speaker’s gavel (the Speaker, for those of you who don’t already know this, gets an actual gavel to do her job with, whereas the Vice President gets the end off an old shaving brush to call his house to order, on the purely specious grounds that the Senate is a more rarified crew of nitwits than the House of Representatives is and therefore it doesn’t take as much noise to get their attention). If he proved reasonably proficient at it, the E Network or MTV might even offer him a reality show in which the Vice President traveled from one end of this our Great Republic whacking deserving political figures over the head. There is no end to the stream of political cockroaches he could stamp on here in the Vampire State, something that would keep the show on the air and flush with ratings for years to come.