Squirrel hunting in Washington

Hi Chuck, I'm Brett and this here’s my pal, Neil, and we just come back from the woods out there in Maryland where we was a-shootin' them damn squirrels morning, noon, and night, and we want you to know that we heard your speech the other day and we thought it was a humdinger, you betcha! Why, I don't think I ever heard such a good speech before, no sirree Bob! The thing of it is, though, Chuck, me and Neil was wondering about this here price you was saying we was gonna have to pay. Now, we cracked out our copies of the Constitution and checked up on Article III (the three iii's, well, that's them ancient Romans' way of saying 3, which is understandable, not like V being their way of saying five. Nothing about a V says five to me, but I may just be missing something here) and right there in Article III it says that we get keep our jobs just so long as we behave ourselves and don't get drunk on a Saturday night and go shooting out the lights in front of the Capitol. It'll be a bit of a strain, but I think we can manage that. There ain’t hardly no point to wasting ammunition like that, anyways. So we're not too worried about the price we'll have to pay for getting crossways of you. After all, Chuck, we're both younger than you and we will, in all probability, still have a job here in Washington when you are dead and gone. Remember, Chuckles, we don't gotta run for nothing no more. So, we’ll be seeing you around and, just remember, stay away from them there squirrels!

Apologies

Yes, I know I said that I would have something new here in a week and that it's been almost a month since I posted anything, but I am working on a couple of things here and I will put them up just as soon as I can. I promise. Really, I mean that....you know, I can hear you snickering out there, dammit!

Investment advice from the fifth dimension

I got an email from my sister who’s not really my sister the other day, which is a relationship sufficiently out of the ordinary to call for some explanation. Barbara and her family lived next door to us in the Bronx, back in the days when Ike was the President of this our Great Republic and all was right in the world, except for the usual suspects like the Middle East, which was as intractable then as it is now. Barbara was a teenager then and whenever Mom and Dad had to go out, she’d come across the hall to baby-sit my brothers and me. Her own mother was in the last stages of lymphatic cancer then, so Barbara and my mother became very close during what had to have been an incredibly trying time.  Barbara always called our mother Mommy and we (my brothers and I) always thought of her as our cool older sister. She took us to the park and the playground and to the movies too; I still remember seeing Goldfinger and Thunderball—I was big on James Bond then; I had the action figures and everything—and Barbara took us all to see Mary Poppins when it opened at Radio City Music Hall in 1964, a year, I should point out to the younger readers, when there were no dinosaurs living in the New York City sewers or anywhere else on Earth, except for Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the shock wave from the asteroid hadn’t arrived yet. 

As time passed, Barbara’s fate was the fate of all cool older sisters: she went to college, she got married, and then she moved away and started a family of her own. We stayed in touch, though; she called her Mommy at least once a week, no matter where she was, and when we needed advice, we’d call her and talk to see what she thought. And we would listen to what she had to say, because her advice was always sound and because she was our big sister, and we loved her and her good opinion was important to us. 

So, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I got an email from her the other day advising me to invest in hotels in the greater New Delhi area.  Like my mother, Barbara was always on the lookout for a good deal, although the sudden interest in foreign real estate puzzled me. She’d never shown any interest in the subject before she died last year of the same kind of lymphatic cancer that killed her mother in 1959 and I wondered why she’d developed such an interest now. But I suppose being dead broadens one’s horizons in much the same way that travel does, and getting investment advice from one’s dead relatives via email certainly makes more sense that having to go to séances run by Madame Griselda, who tells her customers that she is a Hungarian Gypsy and who is, in reality, a third generation Italian American from Secaucus, New Jersey, or cracking out the old ouija board and wondering what the spirits are trying to tell you. Email is a much more efficient form of communication than mediums, ouija boards, or even the occasional burning bush, even if burning bushes have a really good spam filter.

And getting investment advice from the dead certainly makes more sense than getting advice from some Wall Street financial type. With the latter you have to spend a good amount of time wondering if they are trying to get you to invest because it’s good for your portfolio or whether they want you to invest in one thing or another because they intend to make a fortune shorting the stock once they’ve gotten enough suckers to take the bait. With your dead relatives, on the other hand, you can rest assured that they have your best interests at heart, assuming, of course, that they weren’t organ donors and their heart is now in some checkout clerk at a Wal-Mart just outside of Boise, Idaho. It’s not like the dead have any interest in earning sales commissions or shorting stocks or have someplace to spend the money once they’ve earned it. There’s a good reason why there are no good delicatessens or Citroen car dealerships in American cemeteries and the steadfast immobility of the deceased labor market probably has something to do with that.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. We live in a cynical age and I know that you’re thinking that the person on the other end of those emails is not my sister who’s not really my sister, but some subcontinental digital goniff who hacked into her account and does not know that I am on to him and his thieving ways. I would be a terrible person if I even considered this idea for even a moment. If I did, then I would be the kind of person who thinks that someone who did something like this is the verminous spawn of a syphilitic latrine cleaner of the Bhangi caste and a leprous sow, a piece of filth who enjoys inserting razor blades into his own penis in order to alleviate the pain of his baseball-sized kidney stones and telling people that if they like their doctor, they can keep them. Well, maybe that last one is an untruth too far, but you get my point. We may live in a cynical age, but I refuse to allow this to affect my happy and joyous outlook on life or to wish my older sister who isn’t my sister all the success in the world in her new career in finance and real estate.

Phoniness and how to achieve it...

I must admit to a certain amount of befuddlement as I watched the former junior senator from Illinois first tell the body politic that he found out about the IRS scandal in the newspapers the same way everyone else did, which is strange when you think about it, given that the newspapers have been bending and twisting like a Mobius loop on LSD to avoid mentioning the story at all, and then only a week or so later, tell us all that the story was phony.  His personal sock puppet confirmed shortly thereafter that not only was the IRS story phony, so was any interest in the events that took place in Benghazi, Libya, on 11 September 2012. There was, in what has become the mantra of our erstwhile Illinois Incitatus’ administration, nothing to see here, please move on.  Now, I am as willing to move on as the next fellow, especially if the moving on will send me to Paris for a week, but at the moment I am still befuddled and no one in this administration seems interested in fuddling me. The Benghazi story involves the death of four people, including an American ambassador, which is not something that happens every day, and the IRS story involves a humongous government bureaucracy that no one likes using its power to go after people whose political ideology differs from that of Senator Whilom.  But I guess He knows better than the rest of us and so we must all go along with what He says.  If He says these are phony scandals then they must be phony scandals.  These matters are too complex for us ordinary folks to wrap our minds around. And all of God's children said, Amen.

Of course, the dimmest of dim bulbs can probably figure out from themselves that the violent death of an American ambassador qualifies as news everywhere in the world except in the United States, where any story that does not sing the hosannas of The One is published on page 43 next to the religion page, and that having the IRS call you in for an audit is an unpleasant experience akin to having root canal work done without the Novocain.  And then there is the spectacle of Ms. Lerner, the presidential myrmidon who did the Chicago Gang’s hatchet work at the IRS, invoking her Fifth Amendment rights before Congress. Now, I realize that as an American citizen that Ms. Lerner has the same right to invoke the Fifth Amendment’s provision against self-incrimination in front of a congressional committee or a court of law that anyone else has to invoke the Fifth Amendment in front of a Congressional inquiry or a court of law.  I, however, am not a congressional committee nor am I a court of law, which is good news for a lot of people in this neck of the woods, and so I get to say terrible things like the only reason a high government official invokes her Fifth Amendment rights in front of a Congressional inquiry is that she has something she really wants to hide from that Congressional inquiry.  That’s where the former junior senator from Illinois’ attempt to befuddle the American public goes a bit astray, I think.  Benghazi involves the sort of murky intrigue that you might find in a John Le Carre novel; this is the sort of deep wheels within wheels stuff that might take the average reader months to figure out. On the other hand, there’s no way to make the IRS thing look good.  Spin, you see, can only accomplish so much, and smoke and mirrors don't work very well if you've left the fan on and the windows open. The magic show only works if the audience can't work out for themselves what's going on, and in this case, they can. No one needs The One’s intervention and ever-wise counsel to know that He and His minions were doing something very fishy with the IRS. Simplicity can be very annoying, especially for the more flackish among us; simplicity, after all, doesn't allow for much wiggle room and these days the current maladministration needs wiggle room the size of the Louisiana Purchase just to get by. In any case, everyone is clamming up down along the Potomac, which is a small mercy, I think, given that you usually can't get these people to shut up, and you know that when these clowns all clam up at the same time or start yelling racism at the same time or start wriggling like worms trying to get off the hook at the same time things are starting to go south in a big way.  I am hoping for one gynormously humongous stink to start coming from this, but then again, I am easily entertained. Your opinion may differ.

Pot shot

"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.." The former junior senator from Illinois, bloviating on January 21.

Why not, I wonder?  He does it all the time and he seems to be doing quite well with the strategy, unless, of course, this is not a strategy but rather an example of what the psychologists call projection, wherein one imputes one's own faults and shortcomings on to someone else. In either case, it hardly seems fair that He gets to project stuff and the GOP does not, and since fairness is the great mantra of the Illinois Messiah and His minions one would expect that conservatives would sue this maladministration for violating our equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment. I don't think it will happen, though; the trial lawyers are on His side. Such is life, I fear.

BROADWAY: Among my less onerous duties here at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor daily for the biblical mite is sign making. Now, your average American public library is chock full of signs these days, just as the average American public library is chock full of functionally illiterate people who cannot read these signs and whose only interest in the average American public library centers on where the DVD section is and where they can download Internet porn. But even so, the signs pullulate, spreading over walls, ceiling, stacks, and just about every other flat surface in the library like so much hyperactive and overly intelligent kudzu, until there are as many words on the walls informing people where they can go and where they can’t go, what they can do and what they can’t do as there are in many of the books on the shelves. Not as many words as a Tolkien or Tolstoy, obviously, and certainly not Proust, but maybe a couple of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret books and maybe Faulkner’s Spotted Horses for good measure. If you prefer 19th century Americans to Faulkner, you may substitute Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener or Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown instead. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych or Maupassant’s Boule de suif are equally acceptable, although Gogol is not. It is difficult enough to maintain the high standards of decorum necessary for the proper functioning of your average American public library without noses popping off and doing whatever they damn well please.

I don’t mind doing the signs, nor do I mind proofreading other people’s signs or doing the occasional tweak that will make a sign that much more effective in not reaching the broad swath of people who daily pass through our doors to submit their lungs for mycological experimentation. It was in this latter capacity that I found myself with a new sign on my desk and a note from the nice Chinese lady who runs the monthly movie program asking me if I would check her grammar and, while I was at it, could I make the reds in the sign a little redder? Sensing a challenge ahead of me, I immediately set to work on her current creation.

After about an hour, I gave up. The sign’s text was fine; there were no grammatical errors and the meaning was clear: the library will present, on the last Friday of the month, the 1954 version of A Star is Born, starring Judy Garland and James Mason. The problem came when I tried to brighten the reds in the sign. Every attempt at brightening or saturating those reds led ineluctably to the same result: the picture of Judy Garland saturated way too much. In fact, the picture saturated to the point where Ms. Garland’s face and hands looked as though they had blood smeared all over them. In frustration, I sat back and tried to think of some other way of doing this, and as I did, it occurred to me that there aren’t any really good Broadway musicals about mass murderers anymore.

There was Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, of course, and while there just aren’t enough good things you can say about a homicidal barber and his slightly odd lady friend’s attempt at making cannibalism an important part of the ever competitive fast food industry, the play first went on the boards some twenty-five years ago, if my memory serves me correctly, and there hasn’t been a successful one since then. The Texas Chainsaw Musical closed out of town when the Peoria Police Department’s SWAT team cut down the cast in a hail of automatic weapons fire, and many other projects simply never got off the ground, either for lack of funding or lack of interest. Even the one everyone thought was going to be a massive success, The Silence of the Lambs, failed miserably, despite its classic story of boy meets girl, boy flays girl, boy gets shot by girl FBI agent. Some critics say that the producer’s attempt to generate some buzz by having a naked actress randomly fire a shotgun into the audience turned off many theatergoers, while the consensus of opinion amongst many Broadway professionals was that the songs didn’t really support the book, and as a result what the public saw was a somewhat disjointed effort that neither edified nor entertained, despite the near constant gratuitous sex and violence that audiences have come to expect in the theater these days.

It’s a shame, I think, that a proud old genre like the American mass murderer musical should have fallen on such hard times. Those musicals, the product of a much more innocent time, spoke to our hopes and dreams of a better world, but facts remain facts, no matter how unpleasant. By the 1960’s, the audience simply outgrew the genre and moved on to other things. Today with the Internet and 500 cable channels, it would be difficult, at best, to bring back a genre that required little more than a willingness to suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours and wait for the slutty blond to die a horrific and spattery death while wearing the minimum of clothing required to avoid a police raid.