MARCH ON WASHINGTON: And so there they were, the Congressional Black Caucus, marching bravely through the mobs of racist tea partiers screaming racial epithets and spitting upon the tribunes of the people as they went up the stairs into the Capitol to do the nation’s business. Having reached the safety of a friendly press conference, the members of the Caucus complained mightily of their mistreatment in terms that bordered on the near apocalyptic, except, of course, without the part about no one actually screaming racial epithets and that the one spitting incident seems to have been an accident—a tea partier let some spit fly as he was shouting a nonracial epithet at one of the Congressmen. In any case, and please forgive me for being cynical here—I assure you it is entirely unintentional—but wasn’t the point of the Congressional Black Caucus’ marching through the outraged throngs of their fellow citizens to elicit the very threats, racial epithets, and assaults on personal dignity the Caucus says it endured, and which no camera in a camera saturated area seems to have recorded, including the cameras of some members of the Caucus carried as they made their way through the maddened racist throng? This last fact is particularly interesting, I think, since if the N-bomb were flying fast and furious during the Caucus’ march to the Capitol we can assume that the video would have hit YouTube that night. That no one has seen the Congressional cameras’ view of these events suggests to me that the files are probably resting on some staff member’s technodork nephew’s computer even as we speak, awaiting epithet insertion at the appropriate places. The left cannot permit the masses’ lack of cooperation to spoil a perfectly good narrative.

After his distressing non-life threatening experience, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina said that the situation outside the Capitol reminded him of the darker days of the civil rights struggle, and so it should, I think, especially to any white segregationist establishment politician trying to uphold an unpopular law in the face of the principled opposition of the American people. The times, they are a-changin’, ain’t they, boys and girls?

STUPAK IS KAPUTS: And so last night I was flipping through the channels, as I am wont to do, and for once I actually stopped at MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, making me one of twelve people watching the show last night. I don’t do this very often; now that I think on it, I almost never watch MSNBC, but I only have basic cable and the music choice channels weren’t playing anyone I like. And so there was Rachel castigating Bart Stupak left, right, and center…well, mostly left, actually—it is MSNBC, after all—with all the usual contempt we expect from Rachel and her ilk. The thrust of her jeremiad was that Mr. Stupak held out for so long in order to get more face time on television, that he was a lout and a knave and a lousy no-goodnik to boot. And I had to chuckle.

Poor Bart. What did he get for his sellout? He didn’t even get the lousy tee shirt, which at least has some practical utility. He doesn’t even get some mild respect from the swamp creatures on the Left, who spew their vitriol on him now that they don’t need him anymore. All he got was a legally non-binding piece of paper with a promise the President has no intention of keeping written on it. Mary Landrieu held out for $300 million; Bart will be lucky to get $10 for that executive order on eBay. In Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More castigates an old friend who took the Oath of Loyalty to the Church of England in return for a minor political office:

“Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?

And then Bart had to get up and defend the Democratic Party’s stand on the abortion issue. I watched him do that, too, and it was fascinating. You don’t see people morally soil themselves on television every day, unless you’re a big fan of Jerry Springer. Once upon a time, people who sold out their most deeply cherished beliefs had the good manners to slink off into the shadows, there to enjoy whatever squalid reward they sold out for, and to live thereafter in a perpetually renewing pool of regret and self-abasement. That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, I hear, which is just another example of the decline of manners in today’s society. Poor Bart—any teenaged girl could have told him that they wouldn’t respect him in the morning.

It is the day after St. Patrick's Day, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, shaking, or otherwise mixing drinks of any kind, for all the little drunks are now too hung over for words to describe. This is a good thing, I think, primarily because young persons do not learn anything unless the anything involved hits them very hard on their incredibly obtuse skulls. This is a lesson that most educators do not grasp fully. Your average teacher still believes that he or she is preparing young minds for the future, whereas your average American high school is simply a very large warehouse where civil servants can collect large paychecks and where the hormonally engorged can conduct their social lives away from their parents' supervision; if someone actually does learn something every once in a while, this is nice, to be sure, but not terribly germane. For this crowd, this is why St. Patrick's Day, or St. Paddy's Day, as they prefer to call it, exists. The day exists so that they may leave their suburban warrens and descend upon the great metropolis, eager to suck up any alcohol they can get their hands on, sit on the big rocks in Central Park, and smoke pot, if alcohol is not immediately available. They won't spend any time, if they can help it, actually watching the parade, although in their defense, I must say that watching oddly dressed pedestrians strolling down the street amidst a self-generated megadecibel cacophony loses interest after a while; said cacophony also damages your eardrums. But they don't forget the patron of the day, the reason that they are wandering around the streets of the metropolis in a drunken stupor. No indeed, scarce five minutes went by yesterday without at least one of these bright young cretins shouting, "St. Paddy's Day! St. Paddy's Day!" This announcement of what everyone already knows was almost inevitably followed by the pronouncement, "I am so totally fucking wasted!", which was also something everyone else could figure out for themselves. It has been a while since I attended Catholic school, and no, I am not going to give a specific figure for just how long a while it has been, but as I remember it, the importance of Patrick came from his conversion of the Irish from paganism to Christianity. I am sure if the central tenet of Irish Christianity was "Let's get hammered" one of the nuns would have told me so. Or maybe I was just sick that day and missed the class. That's always a possibility, I suppose.

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE FRENCH I TOOK: I don’t know a lot about a lot of things. The finer points of Christian theology are a mystery to me, as are higher mathematics, medium mathematics, and most lower mathematics as well. When I was a boy I could bisect an angle with the greatest of ease; this was my one and only mathematical accomplishment throughout elementary and secondary school and I was very proud of my talent; but in the years since I left school no one has asked me to bisect an angle, not even a little one, and so my bisecting skills have vanished from want of practice. Even without mathematics in its various permutations, there are still plenty of things that I do not understand nowadays. For example, you may not have heard about this—in fact, there’s no reason why you should have heard about it, which is why I’m telling you about it now—but this week has been a very good week for the forces of law and order here in our happy little burg. Yes, the citizenry can nestle safe in their beds tonight, happy in the knowledge that our local gendarmerie, a stout-hearted body of men admired by all here, despite their proclivity for suing the mayor, the chief of police, and the city council for reasons best known to themselves, have finally, after a months long investigation, smashed a large and vicious criminal gang trafficking in stolen pound cakes. We, the law abiding denizens of our happy little burg, can only congratulate our men in blue for their stalwart efforts to protect us from the depredations of local socioeconomically deprived pound cake pilferers and we hope that the police and the district attorney’s office will 1.) Prosecute these malefactors to the fullest extent of the law and send them to prison for a very long time, 2.) Don’t beat the crap out of the suspects just for the fun of clobbering the felonious, a practice prevalent in this neck of the woods, even if various other authorities frown on the practice, and 3.) Don’t do something incredibly stupid like eating the evidence, which is exactly the sort of dumbass thing you’d expect those clowns to do if you gave them half a chance.

Pound cake thievery is one of the few persistent social problems hereabouts, the others being the illegal production of chocolate bundt cakes and the further depredations of the Pisser, a local desperado known for writing obscene messages about the Mayor on the sidewalk in front of City Hall with the eponymous bodily fluid as his ink of choice. In any case, scarcely a day goes by here without some good citizen calling police headquarters to complain that someone has broken into their homes and made off with their pound cakes. As far as I can tell, we are the only municipality in the area with this problem. In the slough of urban despond immediately across the river from us, for instance, the majority of the antisocial element concentrates on such remunerative crimes as selling drugs and armed robbery, and ignore baked goods entirely. Why thieves would choose to target pound cakes is a mystery to me and to everyone else in town, but the citizenry has clearly taken all they intend to endure: while out walking a few weeks ago I saw a woman catch one of the thieves red-handed; the battle between the two of them had spilled out into the street, with the woman quickly gaining the upper hand; when the police finally arrived she had the young punk down on the ground and was busy trying to choke him to death with a chafing dish. But while I approve of the citizenry beating these young thugs to within an inch of their lives with whatever crockery is at hand, I still don’t understand why anyone would want to steal pound cakes for a living in the first place. I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m slow.

I see a lot of odd things when I am out walking, some of which I don’t understand at all. Today, for example, I saw the UPS man delivering parcels to our local post office. At first, I gave the matter no thought; you see UPS and FedEx delivery people every day of the week on every street from one end of this our Great Republic to the other; it is, after all, a free country, or so people keep telling me, and UPS and FedEx can deliver stuff to anyone willing to pay them to have stuff delivered. And then something besides a nun or my mother struck me: the United States Postal Service uses UPS. Now, if I remember this correctly, the USPS is in the business of delivering stuff. UPS and FedEx are also in the business of delivering stuff. What’s more, the USPS is a semi-governmental stuff delivering organization, which is a roundabout way of saying that the USPS loses money hand over fist every year delivering stuff and that the taxpayers then have to make up the shortfall on the Postal Service’s bottom line (NOTE to the interested: the Confederate Post Office was the only Post Office in American history to make money. Really, it was; you can look it up). UPS and FedEx, on the other hand, are not semi-governmental stuff delivering organizations and therefore do not require me to make up their annual financial shortfalls, assuming they have annual financial shortfalls. But when you are a semi-governmental stuff delivering organization, you get to do things like hire your competition to deliver your stuff for you. For the casual observer, having a semi-governmental organization that delivers stuff for a living use its competition in the stuff delivering business to deliver its stuff leads ineluctably, a word I just saw in the Reader’s Digest and am now using here for the first time, to the question of why not have UPS and FedEx deliver everyone’s stuff and cut out the USPS entirely? This makes sense to a lot of people, none of whom have a government job. If they did, they would know better than to think such foolish thoughts.

And then there are the vegan bicycles for Haiti. I must admit that the question of sending bicycles, whether they be vegan, omnivorous, or carnivorous, to a disaster zone is one that had never occurred to me before, although I am sure there must be some connection between the two; there is scarcely a wall or a telephone pole anywhere within the city limits not covered with handbills announcing that vegan bicycles are raising money for Haiti. I’ve read most of these handbills and I still have no damn clue what a vegan bicycle might be. I know who vegans are, of course; in the main, vegans are gastronomic snobs who believe that their refusal to consume any sort of animal product whatsoever bestows upon them a moral stature vastly superior to the boorish omnivorous masses who enjoy stuffing their pie holes with a Big Mac, French fries, and a large Coke every now and again. I still, however, do not grasp the connection such odd eating habits might have with Haitian relief or even with bicycles, for that matter. Bicycles have always seemed somewhat non-ideological to me, unlike, for example, roller skates and pogo sticks, both of which have a whiff of the demagogic about them, but then, I haven’t ridden a bike in almost thirty years and anything can happen in that amount of time. So, I still don’t understand what’s going on, but there’s nothing new about that, unfortunately. I am sure the Haitians will be happy to have the money, or the bicycles, no matter what their make or eating habits might be. Maybe the vegan bicycles could have a bake sale; it’s not like they have to worry about the pound cake pirates anymore; and they could have UPS or FedEx deliver the proceeds, along with whatever other stuff the USPS doesn’t want to deliver.