AT RANDOM: Representative Parker Griffith, a Democrat of Alabama, is shedding his allegiance to the party of Jefferson and Jackson both forthwith and posthaste, a consequence, he says, of the Democratic Party’s unconscionable support for the health care bill currently before the Congress. It is interesting to note that even though there are almost twelve months between now and the next election, and that the Congress has not even sent the bill in its final form to the President for his signature, the rats are already deserting the sinking ship. A curious phenomenon, to be sure, although I suspect that we will be seeing more of this sort of thing in the days and weeks ahead. Whatever the many noxious denizens of the regions along the Potomac lack in principles and intestinal fortitude they do make up for in sheer survival instinct.
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If you haven’t heard about this, here you are: Harry the Bagman, the Senate’s peculator in chief, has included language in the health reform bill that would make this abomination unrepealable by a future Congress. You really do have to admire the intellectual chutzpah of someone who believes in a living Constitution that changes with every shift in the political wind, but whose spray painting on said document must live forever because he says so.

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If the Federal government can force me to buy health insurance even though I would prefer to spend the money getting a plasma TV, can they, using the same logic, compel me to buy a Buick, given that the government will be making Buicks for the foreseeable future? And will people with incomes under $250,000 be entitled to free oil changes and tire rotations as well, or is that extra?

FAMILY PIX: Family photographs are wonderful things, or so people keep telling me, but I have very little use for them. I will admit to a certain amount of prejudice in the matter, as family photographs of the Clan Bashmachkin invariably include members of the eponymous clan (and I know this for a fact, too; I’ve seen some of those photographs and there are family members in each and everyone of them). Given that I do not want to see these people in the flesh, a phenomenon that ineluctably leads to my handing out money I will never see again, I do not care to see them in photographic reproductions in either color or black and white. To be honest, I find the idea of willingly looking at those people more than a bit nauseating, if not actually perverse, a vile and unnatural act akin to putting spicy brown mustard on chocolate ice cream or rooting for the Red Sox.

I cannot say with metaphysical certainty when I developed this aversion to my own flesh and blood, but I am pretty sure that it arose in utero, when I learned that I was not going to be Bill Gates. I was profoundly nonplussed when I got the news, an understatement if there ever was one. I thought the interview had gone well and I knew that I’d scored high in the swimsuit competition and I was sure that things were going my way, so finding out that not only was I not in the running anymore, but that some little dweeb from Washington State had beaten me to the job did not make me very happy, as you might imagine. I knew that there was some chicanery afoot and I immediately demanded a recount, but alas, it was not to be. In such matters knowing the people who count the votes is much more important than having the voters on your side, and under the circumstances I had no choice but to concede. I didn’t like conceding, not by a long shot, but sometimes you’re just stuck with a bad hand. What can you do?

In any case, the folks who decide these things did not take kindly to my challenging their decision and, in their infinite wisdom and not at all in a spirit of malice, payback, or making an example for others who might think that they got a raw deal as well, they dropped me into the Clan Bashmachkin, as ill-fated a crew that ever stepped into a pile of bad karma while walking down a city street. The relatives keep telling me that things could have been worse, which is an Irish way of keeping things in proportion: no matter how positively awful the bad thing that just happened to you was, it could have been much, much worse. They will then regale with a story about their Uncle Liam in Mullingar, who had a stroke in a barn while trying to saddle a horse and couldn’t move or call out for five hours and had to lay there up to his neck in chicken crap while the pigs ate his left leg down to the bone. The story is usually pointless: Uncle Liam is back in the saddle now, the stroke was minor, and he never liked his left leg when he had it nor does he miss the limb now that it’s gone; and even if the story is not entirely pointless, which is only true in a miniscule number of cases, I find that this is usually the sort of willful denial of reality that I would prefer to skip without hearing the punch line.

You find this sort of denial everywhere these days if you really know where to look. Take squirrels, for example. Squirrels are homicidal little bastards, not that you would learn this from the press these days. Squirrels are one of the many species protected under the terms of the Disney Dispensation, which declares that all cute, furry mammals are cuter than a bug’s ear, an idiom I’ve never really understood, since if you could see a bug’s ear, assuming the bug in question has ears at all—some don’t, you know, even the ones who used to work for Richard Nixon—you would probably find the bug’s ear just as repulsive as the rest of the bug. Bugs, as a rule, do not fall under the protective folds of the Disney Dispensation; they tried, even picketing Disney Studios to get themselves included, but Walt brought in the strikebreakers—the Beagle Boys did the dishonors, as Uncle Scrooge McDuck was in Howdoyoustan that week foreclosing on a dung beetle—and broke the union; and now everyone everywhere may slaughter bugs in droves, hordes, masses, or whatever other collective adjective you wish to use without your conscience bothering you in the least.

Squirrels, by contrast, are too damn cute for words. I realize that cuteness has its place in the world, preferably a place as far away from me as possible, but I should point out that no one thought the Nazis were cute either, except for the occasional lonely Naziette. I realize that this bit about Nazis has nothing to do with squirrels and their effect on twenty-first century American social and political reality, but it does give me the chance to use the neologism Naziette in a sentence. If you don’t like Nazis, Naziettes, or neologisms, just skip this sentence and move on to the next one. It’s a pip… not this one, the next one. Cute or not, it is difficult to get Americans to see squirrels for the vicious and violently territorial critters they really are. Your average American will look upon a knock down, drag out, winner take all grudge match between two squirrels over who gets an especially big acorn and smile and tell themselves, oh, isn’t that cute, look at those two sweet little squirrels playing with one another when what is actually going on is that the squirrels in question hate each other’s guts and are trying to sink their teeth into each other’s necks. I also doubt that most mothers in this country would want their offspring to hear the profanity laced abuse these two squirrels are heaping upon one another as this fight gets nastier and nastier. Like modern twelve-tone Moldavian folk opera, one appreciates the spectacle better when one doesn’t understand a word anyone is saying. Knowing only spoils the mystery.

The same is true with your average family photograph. You’d never know from looking at them just how much your Uncle Harry hates his deadbeat brother in law who lives in the cellar of Uncle Harry’s house rent-free because his wife says so or how many people in a wedding picture know that the father of the bride is not the proud man walking arm in arm down the aisle with the blushing bride, but the older gentleman with the incredibly fake looking toupee sitting two rows behind them on the left, the somewhat seedy looking man leaning over and whispering something into the ear of his fourth wife, a once and future ecdysiast who did not get the memo on what to wear to a wedding and consequently looks as though she’s just looking for a handy Pole to leap onto. No, when the photographer is around snapping away everyone’s just one big happy family and don’t you forget it, buster, even if the family involved makes the Borgias look positively warm and fuzzy by comparison.

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE THINGS DOWN: Louis XIV, who was a well-known French person for those of you interested in well-known French persons, did not like water. He didn’t even like branch water, a peculiar aversion in a man whose family name was Bourbon, and because of his aversion to all things aquatic he refused to take more than one bath a year. The royal bath was, like the soul of wit, short and to the point. First, the Masters of the Royal Bath would enter Louis’ presence with a bowl of warm water as the court orchestra played a fanfare composed especially for the occasion by Rameau or Couperin. At the conclusion of the fanfare, Louis would step down from the royal throne and then dip the tip of his considerable nose into the royal bowl. Then he would ask for a towel. The Masters of the Royal Bath, their duty done for the year, would withdraw from Louis’ presence and then go back to their day jobs at the department of motor vehicles, where they could spend their working days not doing much of anything on a more consistent basis. For Louis, the tip of his nose was now very clean, at least for a minute or so, even if the rest of the royal carcass still reeked like week-old dead cat deep-fried in rancid week-old equally dead fish oil, but as most of Europe smelled the same way at the time, no one cared. It was enough for most Frenchmen that Louis was le roi soleil, the Sun King, and every patriotic Gallic heart could burst with malodorous pride knowing that the wonders of Louis’ court rivaled the magnificence of the sun. Whether the sun actually smelled like Louis is a matter of scientific and historical conjecture; in space, no one can tell you stink.

I like water, on the other hand, especially the water at my house. I don’t know how my father managed to swing this particular bit of good luck, but my house sits on top of the sweet water of an otherwise sulfurous aquifer. This is a good thing, I think; I dislike the sulfur water almost as much as good King Louis hated water in general. There’s nothing that will turn a growing boy’s stomach faster than going to a friend’s house and trying to drink grape Kool-Aid that reeks of rotting eggs. The attempt was invariably unsuccessful, resulting in a large purple stain on the front of my tee shirt. My mother would yell at me when I got home, as these stains never come out as well as the detergent commercials would have you believe, and at the end of our summer in the country (we lived in the Vampire State’s eponymous megalopolis at that time) I usually had a great collection of tie-dyed tee shirts. As this was just before the great tie-dyed fashion revolution swept through the youth culture, I take some small measure of pride in knowing that I was a trendsetter, a fashion outlier pointing the way to a glorious future filled with organic vegetables, hippy kitsch, and Grateful Dead concerts. Not every ten-year-old boy can put that on his resume, you know.

To return to the subject, which is either French history or astronomy—I’ve forgotten which at this point—hang on a moment and let me check this out…water. Okay. As I was saying, the water in our well is very nice, or at least I think so, and for years my family and I drank the water without any sort of filtration. We thought nothing of it at the time; the water was clear, it didn’t stink, it was free, and so we guzzled the water down like pitchers of green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. Years later, unfortunately, we discovered the horrifying truth: it was hard water. Very hard water. My brothers and I spent our childhoods wondering why we’d spent our youths passing kidney stones the size of bowling balls and now we knew. We’d spent our idyllic summers pouring liquid gravel down our throats, not that I have some sort of animus against gravel, you understand; my favorite cartoon was The Flintstones, which was as gravel pitting a cartoon as you could hope to find in the Stone Age, when gravel pitting was big business, even if Betty and Wilma never thought of gravel as one of the four major food groups.

But our kidneys were soft and reasonably pliable then, unlike nowadays when age has had its way with them, and so we could handle the constant passing of sand through the waterworks. My plumbing is not as forgiving now. I am referring here to my home’s plumbing, not my own, although I understand how you might think otherwise. In the opinion of a number of professional plumbers I know, whose opinion I value and whose friendship with my late father prevents them from charging me an arm and a leg for simply looking at my plumbing I value even more, I need to do something about my piping now. Apparently, my house need never worry about osteoporosis; there is enough calcium in my pipes to keep vast armies of old ladies standing perpendicular to the floor for a good many years to come.

[Approximately two weeks pass, during which the management served tea and sandwiches to the assembled masses. The All-Girl Geriatric Glockenspiel Jazz Band provided the music.]

Yes, our kidneys were indeed soft and pliable in those days, and our minds were both keen and sharp, if that’s not actually redundant, and capable of retaining one’s thoughts for more than a few short days. But with age we put away childish things, as the Scriptures tell us, although the truth of the matter is that time does most of the putting away for us and doesn’t even ask for a tip, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your financial situation. For example, I put this piece aside for a while so that I could compose a vicious hatchet job mocking the intellectual basis of the former junior Senator from Illinois’ misadministration, and then I had breakfast, I think, or I did something else before finally coming back to this piece, whereupon I found that the piece’s animating idea (all pieces have them, strange as it may seem) no longer animates, and had indeed gone the way of all flesh. In short, I have no clue where this thing was going, but I still have all that water stuff in the beginning and I don’t feel like going back and rewriting the beginning to go with a new end. I realize that I am being incredibly lazy; I should rewrite the thing, but I’m not going to. I blame the current administration for my lack of good old-fashioned American elbow grease; I realize that it’s unfair, but taking the blame for stuff like this is their job, not that you would know it listening to them sometimes.