Gulf of America: not an oil company ad.

 Lucius Cary, the second (or third, I'm not sure which) Viscount Falkland, has always been one of my favorite philosophers.  I doubt he would have thought of himself as a philosopher; he was a soldier and a man of action, a loyal servant of His Majesty King Charles II during the English Civil War (His Lordship’s side lost, in case you were wondering), and I believe that he would have thought prolonged philosophical thinking a bit of a bore when compared to the less intellectual delights of hacking and slashing His Majesty's enemies into a thousand tiny bloody pieces.  Lord Falkland never wrote a philosophical treatise of interminable length, unlike so many other philosophers then and now, who insist that entire forests come crashing down and get pulped into paper so that they can inflict their deep ideas about the meaning of it all upon a long-suffering and not terribly interested humanity.  No, indeed, Lord Falkland was an Englishman of the empirical school, whose entire philosophical output comes down to us in a single sentence, an observation that he made in passing to a friend. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said, “it is necessary not to change.”  That’s it, that’s the whole of it, and his lordship packed more philosophical depth into that one sentence than many philosophers can pack into tomes so physically and philosophically dense that I could drop said tome on a mouse in the absolute certainty that the annoying little rodent would not survive the encounter.  

So why am I subjecting you to all this philosophical beating around the bush about the subject of this screed? This is an exceptionally good question, and I am sure it might have something to do with my being a royal pain in the general posterior, but there is, in fact, an exceptionally good reason.  If you follow the news at all these days, and who isn’t, given that the current president is much more entertaining than the previous president, you will know that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, said change of name being the product of a presidential executive order brought on by a case of excessive pique at the current president of Mexico. I do not know why The Donald chose this name when there are so many more evocative names that come to mind: the Sea of Margaritas, the Bay of Spring Break, the Bay of Babes, or even the Gulf of Dixie for the politically incorrect . The Gulf of America suffers tremendously by comparison. The Gulf of Mexico is tropic heat and long white beaches, palm trees and the sound of Latin music, sweat trickling slowly down your sides into the small of your back as you sit in your beach chair with your margarita in your hand, watching the towering pastel clouds gathering on the horizon and the tanned bikini-clad senoritas, all smiles and laughter, strolling slowly by at the water’s edge, the sultry breeze coming off the sea, and the taste of tequila on your love’s lips as you kiss her in the moonlight. That is the Gulf of Mexico.  The Gulf of America, by contrast, is a gas station. 

The fires this time

 You know, I remember back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina almost moved the city of New Orleans into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, a reporter asked General Honore, the head of the Federal task force coordinating the response  to the catastrophe, a question about the shortcomings of the earlier state and local responses the general had been brought in to correct. General  Honore cut the reporter off, telling him to not get stuck on stupid.  There would be a time for such questions once the disaster was over, but the current moment was neither the time or the place; people needed rescuing, the levees had to be shored up, the city had to be saved.  First things first.

Twenty years later, the city of Los Angeles, California (is the state even necessary in this sentence? There is only one LA, and everyone knows where it is located) is not only stuck on stupid, the city and the state's leadership class is firmly and proudly stuck on stupid, stranded in the muck of its own progressive delusions and doing its best to remain stuck there while simultaneously getting the rest of the country to pay for the cleanup (unlikely) and avoiding responsibility for the fires in the first place (even more unlikely). But hope springs eternal, so there will be no change in the city's forest management program and the reservoirs will remain unfilled and the snail darter will remain protected.  Los Angeles firefighters will have to check the right demographic boxes in order to get a job in the first place and will have to spout the progressive movement's DEI bromides with tremendous enthusiasm in order to keep the job they have.  Insurance companies will not be allowed to make money for their own good and poorly insulated electric wires will remain above ground for reasons that surpasseth understanding. So the more the fires destroy, the more things will stay the same. And Los Angeles, the city and the county, and state of California will not lower taxes on the population in their time of affliction, which makes the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California look a lot less like modern governments and more like a poorly run protection racket operated by the Mafia's not so best and brightest.  All of them will probably be re-elected. 

Today

 It's that time of year once again, so I wish you all, whoever you are, a very Happy and Prosperous New Year..........you do realize that this date is just an arbitrary point in the space-time continuum, don't you?

Christmas Traditions

 TRADITION: This piece is a sort of tradition here at The Passing Parade; I trot it out every year at this time and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed not having to think of something new to write.


There are twelve days of Christmas, and I’m sure if you’ve somehow managed to forget that fact over the course of the year retailers from one end of this our Great Republic to the other will forcibly refresh your memory for the next few weeks. Whether you want to or no, you will hear in great detail about lords leaping and laying ladies while pipers pipe and voyeuristic geese pay five gold rings just to watch. I’ve always wondered why just about every picture of Times Square before its current incarnation as Disney World North had a goose or two in the background. There were just too many of them for this to be some sort of odd ornithological coincidence.

But avian porn is not the subject of this screed, so let us move on before the police arrive. The subject of today’s lecture is the twelve days of Christmas and what they mean to me in five easy lessons. For the better part of the late and deeply unlamented twentieth century it was the fashion among a certain set of people to bemoan the commercialization of Christmas, that the demands of Mammon were stifling the essentially religious nature of the holiday, even to the point where that great philosopher and theologian Linus Van Pelt had to explain to Charlie Brown what Christmas was all about by quoting the Gospel according to Luke. Charlie Brown did not seem impressed by this argument, falling, as it did, between commercials for Benson & Hedges cigarettes and the new 1967 Ford Mustangs.

The fact of the matter is that Christmas has always been a commercial bonanza, a state of affairs that began when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that maybe Christianity wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Constantine came to this conclusion after he’d had a dream the night before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in which he saw a shield emblazoned with a Christian cross bearing the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES (in this sign you shall conquer). After the alarm slave went off the next morning, clocks being fairly scarce in those days, Constantine put Christian crosses on his soldiers’ shields; as the enemy army outnumbered by about four to one, Constantine figured any edge he could get was a good one; and then proceeded to march out and stomp on the competition big time.

Having won the crown in a pretty convincing fashion—Constantine didn’t have to dangle Chad over a cliff or anything—the new emperor decided to return the favor God did him and make Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Once a faith exclusively practiced by the most rejected and despised elements of Roman society, the Christian faith became the most inclusive faith in the Mediterranean world since now everyone and their Uncle Bob had to join whether they wanted to or not, everyone, that is, except Constantine himself. Unlike, for example, Marshal Feng, the twentieth century Chinese warlord who converted to Methodism and then decided that his army should come to the Lord as well, and sped up his army’s salvation by having them stand in formation while he baptized them with holy water sprayed from a fire hose, Constantine chose to exempt himself from the revival, correctly figuring that if he stayed a pagan he could go on doing all the fun stuff that pagans got to do like murdering his political opponents, seizing their property, and selling their families into slavery without this sort of thing bothering his conscience all that much. If he was still a pagan, after all, who could blame him for acting like one?

Our current holiday problem started when Constantine decided that a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus would be just the thing to make himself look good on The O’Reilly Factor. There was, however, one small problem: no one knew when Jesus was born. The Gospels simply say that the birth occurred when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. This might have been enough information in the hands of a competent archivist to pinpoint a likely date, but competent archivists were hard to find in ancient Rome due to the Roman mob’s insatiable appetite for watching overweight, middle-aged clerical types with the wife, the 2.7 kids, the dog, and a thirty year mortgage on a house in the suburbs try to stab each other to death with quill pens in the Coliseum.

Constantine, having no solid information to work with, asked the Senate and the people of Rome what they thought of July 15th as the date for Christmas. The Senate and the people of Rome, mindful of the fact that Constantine had the bad habit of feeding people who disagreed with him to lions and tigers and bears, oh my, for the entertainment of the people in the cheap seats, told Constantine that July 15th was a wonderful idea. Roman retailers, on the other hand, mindful of losing the 4th of July and Bastille Day sales, told him that while his idea was wonderful, it would be even more wonderful at some other time of the year. One clever gent who owned a shoe store on the Appian Way suggested, after giving the matter some thought, that the Emperor make December 25th the date for his new holiday.

Now it was Constantine’s turn to object. At a meeting of the Imperial Chamber of Commerce, he quite rightly pointed out that December 25th was already a holiday, the feast of Invictus Sol and his brother Herschel, the inventors of the pneumatic Roman army chariot wheel and can opener, a device upon which the good fortune of the Roman Empire did not rely in the slightest. Then Constantine had the Pope read the relevant portions of the Gospel of Luke. The Pope stumbled through the text, His Holiness being unused to reading anything longer than an address; he had come to Rome to get a job in the Post Office in Gaul and wound up as Pope for lack any other available employment; and after he finished reading Constantine asked the retailers how they proposed to get around the Gospel’s clearly pointing to a summer date for Christ’s birth. After all, first century Judean shepherds did not keep flocks of sheep out on barren hillsides by night in the middle of winter just on the off chance that a passing heavenly host with some free time on their hands would wander by belting out their rendition of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in digitally remastered stereophonic sound. Clearly, December 25th did not meet the high burden of theological and historical proof required for such an august feast day.

Then someone, possibly the shoemaker who first suggested the idea of the 25th, or maybe his twin brother—no one could really tell them apart—told the Emperor something that emperors, as a class, love to hear: he was emperor, therefore he could put the holiday anywhere he felt like putting it. And so he did, on the 25th day of December, the high burden of historical and theological proof bending slightly in deference to Constantine’s need for campaign contributions; not everyone in the Roman Empire thought that Constantine’s being emperor was such a good idea and he needed money fast; armies, then and now, don’t come cheaply.

Well, over the centuries more and more days got added to Christmas; travel was slow in those days and most people had to use oxcarts that only got twelve miles to the dry gallon of oats, despite the best efforts of the ruminant companies to meet new government mileage standards. The retailers, however, loved the ever-lengthening Christmas season and did their level best to stretch the season out even more. Matters came to a head in 800 A.D., when on the first day of Christmas the Pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne discovered that he and his entourage were stuck in Rome until the end of Christmas, which occurred sometime in the middle of April. This was a major source of annoyance for Charlemagne, who wanted to go home for the holidays, and so in his third official act, the first two being an announcement that alternate side of the street parking rules were in effect and the world’s first pooper scooper law, Charlemagne decreed that Christmas would only last for twelve days.
Retailers throughout Europe objected, which seems to be a theme here, saying that a twelve day Christmas season would drive them out of business; there wasn’t enough time for the scribes to pump out advertising copy in a twelve day season. Charlemagne said, tough luck, pal, in Latin and French, and doesn't almost everything sound better in Latin and French, and then left town with the imperial crown in his luggage, as well as a couple of counterfeit Rolexes he’d bought from a Senegalese immigrant who’d set up his blanket in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The retailers, of course, did not go down without a fight. They’ve been pushing the seasonal envelope ever since Charlemagne rode Out of Town for a second place finish in the fifth race at the Roman Aqueduct. This explains why today, in our modern postindustrial information society, the official Christmas season begins with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and why we still have an annoying carol about the twelve days of Christmas. The unofficial Christmas season, of course, begins near the end of August. This may be why everyone is so happy when Christmas finally arrives—it means that we won’t hear about the damn day again for at least another eight months, something for which we should all shout, Hallelujah and Happy Holidays to all and to all, a good night!

 

PS. I actually have written something new for this blog and as soon as I type it up and do some editing, I will post it here as soon as possible.

Elections

 I have not written much about the current election season, which is to say that I have written nothing about the election at all, for which I do apologize. The comic possibilities raised by the lives and thoughts of the two main candidates are endless and I have chosen not to use them because I am very lazy. Therefore, I am resurrecting a post from 2004. No one liked it then; frankly, I am not sure if I like it now; but it is what it is and I am going to resurrect it from the Blogger boneyard.  Enjoy!!!

Well, the silly portion of the political season has finally arrived and not a moment too soon, I think; the voters can always use some diversion. This year we are all a-buzz about election signs and posters vanishing from roadsides the length and breadth of our happy little burg, vanishing with the rapidity of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies off the top of your grandmother’s oven. There’s no apparent pattern to the thefts; signs for Republican and Democratic candidates alike are disappearing during the dark of night with equal speed, with each side declaring that they are the injured party and blaming the other for the political pilferage. The local constabulary is now hot on the case, the gendarmes declaring that they will get to the bottom of the mystery posthaste and once again make our streets safe for politicians to annoy honest citizens.

Frankly, I don’t care if the signs ever reappear; the streets look just fine without them. I can remember the day when one such sign was put up on a telephone pole near a busy intersection on South Cedar Street, announcing that the gentleman running for office was an outsider, new to politics and, unlike his predecessor, who'd been in office for the better part of thirty years, not at all susceptible to the blandishments and corruption that come with political power; the poster finally weathered away halfway through the man’s third term in the state legislature.

And if the posted signs were in any way protected from the elements then they would never go away, remaining year after year until they became an embarrassment. One famously bald local politico had to paper over a poster like this at a bridge underpass; it had been there for years, reminding the voters that when they first voted the man into office he’d had a full head of hair and only one chin. Some politicians, on the other hand, do that sort of thing on purpose. You can save a lot of money on signs recycling last election’s signs for this campaign. It’s good for the environment as well.

I can see the point of stealing some signs. I’ve read somewhere that there are approximately 86,000 governmental bodies in the United States, the vast majority of which hold elections to determine who gets to run things. There’s so many state senators, assemblymen, aldermen, mayors, school board members, town supervisors, and library board trustees running at any given time that no voter can keep track off them all, and before long they all start to blur together in one's mind. The first time you really know who the candidates for some of these offices are comes when you see their names on the ballot. You have no clue who some of these people are, what with their signs disappearing left, right, and center, and in that case why not just vote for the incumbent, since you really don't want to waste your vote on someone you've never heard of and who was obviously not clever enough to steal his opponent's signs. Letting someone too dumb to steal his opponent's signs anywhere near the public coffers is not a good idea, I think; if he doesn't notice his signs are missing what else won't he notice when he actually has the job?

You don’t always need signs or posters to run for office. A few years ago my brother became the president of our local volunteer fire company, elected for reasons that surpasseth understanding, as the Good Book often says of the Lord when He goeth about smiting the hips and thews of passersby for no immediately discernible reason. My brother was a write-in candidate; he agreed to run because a firehouse faction, and yes, we have those here, needed a warm body in the race. My brother won, which everyone in the family found very odd, and makes one question the wisdom of the whole concept of universal suffrage. In the United States, candidates for public office run for that office; in the United Kingdom, a more politically sedate country, candidates stand for office. My brother is one of the few political candidates anywhere who sat on his ass on a barstool for office. He has since retired from the presidency, laying down the onerous burdens of civic responsibility and returning to a richly deserved private life, ending all too early a none too promising political career. He remains firmly ensconced on his barstool, however, offering sage political advice to all and sundry, which is what got him into trouble in the first place.

So for some, but not all, political races, stealing signs is not at all a bad idea. This, however, brings up the question of why anyone would steal the signs of the presidential candidates? Signs or not, it’s not like the populace doesn’t know who’s running, what with those two guys all over the evening news every night of the week and twice on Sunday. Still, you can never be too careful. I bring my Keep Cool With Coolidge sign into the house with me every night. You never know when you’ll run into a John Davis Democrat; better to be safe than sorry. People were awfully bitter about Davis' losing back in 1924.

Typed this up and forgot about it, or stuff that happens to Donald Trump

 

Well, things have gone to hell in an organic hand-basket here in the Vampire State, which is the norm hereabouts, just in case you did not know that, but this week has proven more norm than the week before that. A jury in the fifth-rate Gomorrah squatting at the mouth of the river that flows two ways has convicted Donald Trump, the erstwhile (or current, depending on who you talk to) President of this our Great Republic, of removing the tags from sheets, pillowcases, and mattresses at his hotels from one end of our amber waves of grain to another. This is a most shocking development, and if you are reading this in the presence of children, I would recommend that you send them out of the room quickly, lest you unwittingly corrupt their innocence forever.

The President manque cannot plead ignorance of the law; generations of Americans have known that the tags on bed linens and mattresses are inseparable from the mattress to which they are attached, and that the Federal government would fully prosecute all malefactors engaged in separating the tag from its pillow.. Sympathy for the ignorant, for the poor schnook just trying to get a good night’s sleep without that tag irritating his feet like a horsefly that keeps buzzing in his ears and won’t back off, even after the schnook’s 438^th attempt to commit blunt force trauma on the fly with a two-year old copy of Good Housekeeping magazine, is wasted on the likes of Mr. Trump, who knew what the law was and chose to play fast and loose with it (wow, you’d need a good pair of binoculars to see the verb from the subject in that sentence).

The jury was on to Mr. Trump’s desperate prevarications about those missing tags, thanks to the heroic police work of Officer S. Gregory, undercover bed inspector for the New York Police Department’s Tag Removal Squad. The Tag Removal Squad is an integral part of the NYPD’s Special Investigations Division, an elite group of detectives that investigates the city’s most sinister crimes. Officer Gregory, who plays the bass strumpet for the NYPD’s marching band when she is not prowling through the bedsheets of the Naked City looking for tag-rippers, spoon lickers, and various other members of the criminal classes, caught Mr. Trump colluding with Russian louts, thieves, and sundry other Slavic ne’er do wells to rip the tags off of the pillows at several Trump hotels in order to invalidate the warranties.  Why Mr. Trump would want to do this was not adequately explained at the trial, but the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case said that the crimes charged might have something to do with insurance fraud, unless they did not have anything to do with insurance fraud. You never can tell about these things, you know; it could be one way or another, unless you are not a Blondie fan.

Short note to a vendor.

 

When June shows up, sunshine is sure to follow.

[from an email from one of our vendors. My response follows, and yes, I know the person that I sent this to.]

Sunshine? Is that June's new boyfriend? I thought his name was Roger or Raymond or something else that starts with an R. Rudolph comes to mind as well, but that may just be because there are now only six shopping months till Christmas. Be that as it may, I hope he's better than the last one she had. I'm sure that sumo is interesting in a weirdly grotesque sort of way; after all, the Japanese love it and one hundred million Japanese can't all be wrong, except about that whole karaoke thing, karaoke being, as far as I am concerned, one of the many very good reasons for why Japan deserved to lose the war; but the idea that someone as short as June would consider a relationship with a man who is taller than she is while lying on his back boggles the imagination in ways that no well-brought up imagination should ever be boggled.  In any case, I trust that all is well with you out there in the middle of the country. Here in the Northeast, we are all melting in the heat and humidity like the Wicked Witch of the West being sprayed with a fire hose during a five-alarm fire.

 

Sincerely,

 

AB