Devil Walls

Well, here I am safely ensconced in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and it is snowing outside. The snow started slowly at first, as snow is wont to do, and now the stuff is falling at a good clip and I am wondering when the powers that be in this place will make the decision to send us all home. Some of my co-workers have already slipped out the back, Jack, as the Paul Simon song says, but I fear that there will be no slipping for me, see. I am stuck. I am stuck because not only is it snowing outside, inside there is no access to the information superhighway, so that the public we serve with all our hearts can no longer use our computers to search for job sites, computer games, and free porn, and to ensure their access to all of the above, I must stay here in order to let in a computer / online services technician who is coming today to solve all of our digital access problems, providing, of course, he can get through the snow. So all is not well in my world, given that I would really like to get out of here before I have to cross-country ski my way home, but duty calls and I must remain. Frankly, that bites the big one.

Therefore, I must find ways to keep my mind occupied as the snow falls and the technician wanders blindly around the countryside following the instructions of an inferior GPS application and wondering why he didn’t listen to his mother and become a dope smuggler. Granted there are problems with the government-sponsored retirement system—not everyone can look stylish in orange, after all—but the work is incredibly remunerative and you can get rid of irate customers simply by blowing holes in them with automatic weapons and then leaving their bullet-ridden carcasses in the middle of the street, thereby informing any other disgruntled customers that they had better readjust their collective attitude and undisengruntle themselves quickly or else.  Gruntlement is a wonderful thing, you understand, especially if you know what’s good for you. He will, no doubt, still be thinking these charitable thoughts about his company’s customers when his inferior GPS application tells him he has arrived at his destination and the road signs tell him that he has arrived in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is not even vaguely close to where he is supposed to be.

In any case, everyone in this our Great Republic is talking about walls these days. I am not kidding; walls are all the rage now, the way Pet Rocks and gluten-free peanut butter waffles used to be. You can hardly turn on the television anymore without hearing some hoary old pol screeching that walls are ineffective, unpopular, and worst of all, immoral. This last is somewhat odd, or at least I think so; I went to parochial school for eight years and no one, not one priest, not one Christian Brother, not one nun ever said anything about walls being immoral. How could they? Monsignor O’Malley could hardly denounce a wall as being the equivalent of Communism or masturbation as threats to a good Catholic boy’s soul when the nuns charged with teaching us how to be good Catholics lived in a convent with a fifteen-foot wall topped with broken glass around it.[i]  The only walls that were even vaguely immoral, so far as I can remember, were the Berlin Wall (built by godless Red Communists, as if there were any other kind) and the walls around the city of Jericho, which fell because the people inside were ungodly (but not godless) heathens who did disgusting things with their neighbors and their neighbors’ cocker spaniels, things the nuns could not discuss in religion class, but that were definitely evil in the sight of the Lord, things so evil that the Canaanites deserved to have Robert Moses knock down their walls and push a six-lane freeway right through the heart of Jericho’s business district in order to connect Jericho to the Staten Island Expressway. In short, they had it coming. And all of God’s children said, Amen.

Since it appears that no amount of biblical exegesis will support the contention that walls are by definition malum in se, the amateur theologian must needs look to the motives of the people saying such a thing. Here we come across an interesting point: the most visible person making this contention is the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. The Speaker is, by her own admission, a devout Roman Catholic. However, the Speaker is also a well-known advocate of abortion rights, which puts her in conflict with the teaching of the very church whose doctrine she professes to believe. Since there seems to be no way to reconcile these two belief systems logically, the amateur theologian must therefore come to the conclusion that logic is not involved, that the only way the Speaker can reconcile the inherent contradiction between one set of beliefs and the other is to conclude that she is one of those politicians who would gut her own mother with a dull fish knife to get re-elected and whose political position and power is more important to her than any church dogma or political belief. In that context, then, we can understand her statement that walls are immoral. That which diminishes or threatens to diminish her political position is immoral, that which enhances her political power is moral; it’s not exactly Kant’s categorical imperative, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it works for her and what more can you ask of a philosophical system?

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[i] The walls, in case you were wondering, were that high because an order of contemplative nuns originally owned the convent. The nuns—I think were French but I could be wrong about that—wished to live apart from the world and dedicate their lives to prayer and work, which was easier to do when the Bronx was part of Westchester County than it is nowadays. A century later, the Bronx having voted for inclusion in Greater New York in 1898, and the city having grown considerably since the founding of the convent, the nuns moved to a new convent somewhere near the Finger Lakes, it being easier to contemplate the mysteries of Christ’s suffering and dying for the sins of humanity when you don’t have to listen to the police sirens blaring at all hours of the morning, noon, and night.

JUST DROPPING IN FOR A MOMENT, FOLKS: I’ve been on vacation the past couple of weeks, during which time I’ve managed to pull muscles in my groin and in my upper thigh, events I will have more to say about at another time, and as a result of my vacationing I’ve managed to miss more than a few things in the news. One thing that did get through, though, was the latest on the former junior senator from Illinois’ plan to ruin the American health system, which involves the granting of waivers to posh eateries and other businesses in former Speaker, and yes, I do enjoy writing that, so I will write it again so that I may again have the pleasure of writing the phrase former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district. Combine these with others who have gotten waivers, such as damn near every labor union who wanted one, McDonald’s, Universal Orlando, and several states, including [surprise! surprise!] Harry Reid’s personal fiefdom of Nevada, and what you have is a pretty substantial list of Democratic Party contributors, most of whom lobbied like crazy for the very health plan they now want to get out from under. Forgive me for being cynical, but at this rate Obamacare will share at least one characteristic with Mark Twain’s description of the rules of German grammar: there will be more exceptions to the rules than examples of them. I have heard of the concept of pay to play, which is polspeak for campaign contributions for political favors, but I must admit that I never expected to have to send a check in to the Democratic National Committee just to make sure I could buy an aspirin the next time I have a headache.

STATE OF THE UNION: I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech, although I suppose I should have—it’s part of my civic obligation as an American citizen, after all, just like jury duty or betting on the Lotto and so doing my part to educate the uneducable little wretches that daily infest school buildings from one end of this our Great Republic to the other—but if I want to watch someone spout non sequiturs I’ll watch Chico Marx; he’s funnier than the former junior senator from Illinois and his non sequiturs don’t cost as much. The real reason I didn’t watch the State of the Union, however, is that Miss Nancy is no longer the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Boehner may be a very emotional guy with tear ducts that could sink the Titanic in twenty minutes and the Andrea Doria in half an hour, but he’s not going to jump to his feet every ten seconds the way Miss Nancy did. Watching Miss Nancy doing her imitation of a Jack LaLanne in the Box was always the highlight of the State of the Union speech, because when she leapt up to applaud the former senator’s vapid blatherings, and she would leap up at the drop of a semicolon, all the other Democrats in the chamber had to get to their feet as well, and watching some of those guys trying to get to their feet was morbidly fascinating, in much the same way as waiting for cars to crash at the Daytona 500 is morbidly fascinating.

And no Democratic member of the House could refuse to get up or even hand in a letter from their mother saying they couldn’t stand up because the family doctor said so; no, indeed, Miss Nancy stood watching the members with her chemically enhanced Gorgon glare for any sign of weakness, compromise, second thoughts or, horrors of horrors, moderation and bipartisanship. There would be none of that in Miss Nancy’s House, no sirreee, not if some old-timer wanted to keep his committee chairmanship and thus his personal fiefdom over some small portion of the federal bureaucracy. So the Democratic bulls got up every time Miss Nancy did, whether they wanted to or not, and the viewer at home sat and watched and maybe even took bets on whether or not some of these guys would keel over from all the unexpected exercise or, pushed to the edge at last, join the Republicans in order to stay in their seats.

Of course, had these Democrats crossed the aisle and joined the Republicans they would still have seats to stay in, and now that they are gone and Miss Nancy isn’t Speaker anymore she can use all her newly acquired spare time to step in and take over the late Jack LaLanne’s role as America’s dean of exercise gurus. I’d bet someone as enthusiastic as she is could sell a lot of Jack LaLanne’s juicers on the cable channels; maybe she can even get everyone in this our Great Republic a juicer as part of the former junior senator’s health care reform, that and a DVD giving the recipient instructions on the proper way to do a jumping jack. I know that I wouldn’t mind getting a free juicer at taxpayer’s expense, except that I am one of those taxpayers and I don’t want a juicer and I really don’t want to do jumping jacks. I’m not really a big juice person; juice usually doesn’t have caffeine in it and I more or less insist on there being caffeine in what I drink. And bubbles; I like carbonation a lot too.

POLITICS AS UNUSUAL: Elections have consequences, a point the former junior Senator from Illinois probably wishes he hadn’t raised back in the halcyon days of 2009, when all the world was fresh and young and filled with infinite possibilities, since there are now all too many Republicans who are more than willing to point out that very same fact to him. Being hoist by one’s own petard is never a comfortable feeling, especially as the former junior Senator from Illinois is one of those people who love to rush in where angels fear to tread and do things that no one wants done, and now his ability to rush in doing things that no one wants done has been diminished significantly. I suspect that he will indulge his need to go on vacation more; he will, like George McClellan, spend more time overseas than most people, if only to avoid hearing slanders about himself, and to avoid Republicans quoting that bit about elections and consequences back to him.

All of which leads, more or less inexorably, I think, to the soon to be erstwhile Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi and her current travails. This may be a statement of the obvious, but Washington D.C. is a place where people will choose to ignore the obvious if the obvious is unpalatable enough. You would think that someone who has reached Mrs. Pelosi’s high station in American politics would recognize the obvious when it is so very obvious, but finding the obvious distasteful, Mrs. Pelosi has skipped over the obvious, even when it is very obvious, in favor of her personal vision of the obvious, to which the vast majority of Americans are oblivious. And so, instead of falling on her sword for the good of the party she led to disaster, she will return to the next Congress as the minority leader, the J. Bruce Ismay of her political generation, unashamed, unabashed, and looking for new icebergs to strike. Given her recent contributions to the electoral success of conservatives from one end of this our Great Republic to the other, we can only hope she finds them and does so without delay.

JUST A THOUGHT HERE: Dick Morris said something last night on television that struck me and I thought I'd just make a comment on it. Commenting on The O'Reilly Factor, Morris said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might still have the votes to pass the Obama health care bill. When O'Reilly pointed out that Pelosi only got the House version of the bill through with three votes to spare, Morris said that the Speaker knew she had the votes to win and let the Democrats with marginal seats vote against the bill in order to preserve their chances in the midterm elections in November. Now that the momentum is against her, the Speaker would be able to call on those votes to get the bill through now. I think Morris is a pretty astute observer of the political scene, but I can't but think that he's wildly misreading this. Nancy Pelosi may have had a reservoir of yes votes in reserve on Monday, but after Scott Brown's election to the Senate on Tuesday that reservoir dried up and did so at near light speed. Everyone of those Democrats who voted against the bill is now thinking that they can go home and campaign for re-election on their no vote. There is absolutely no political or personal percentage in any of them changing their vote now; all of those guys know that they have gotten off the hook of the most contentious domestic political issue Congress has faced in a long time, and that they did so only through a trick of political fate. I mean, really, a Republican winning in Massachusetts? I know I didn't think it was possible and I'll bet you didn't either. Unless they have all taken a huge swig of Ms. Pelosi's Kool-Aid, I just do not see any of Mr. Morris' House reserve yes votes volunteering to get back on the hook any time soon. Only Kate Winslet could jump back onto the Titanic and live; it was in her contract. No one else gets her deal.

PELOSI TO COUNTRY: DROP DEAD!:

The above is a headline you are not likely to see in the New York Daily News today, however much it reflects last night’s events. Still, it is always nice to know what the minions of Queen Nancy really think of the people they allegedly represent.

WAFFLING ALONG: GeneralStan is in trouble, boys and girls, there’s no two ways about that. He’s got the Speaker of the House sniffing haughtily, although that may just be her breathing regularly nowadays, what with the Botox overload and all, and a good many lefties bringing up Truman’s firing of MacArthur, which may only prove that some of these guys still have the crib notes their girl friends wrote for them in college on David McCullough’s Truman stuck in a file cabinet somewhere, and columnists like the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson suggesting that what GeneralStan really needs to do is shut the hell up and to do so quickly, the better to keep the electorate from realizing that the largest empty suit in the land is wearing no clothes. I’m sure that all of this must come as a big shock to GeneralStan, who, no doubt, was simply asking for the troops necessary to carry out what was, until a few short weeks ago, the publicly stated policy of the former junior Senator from Illinois, and did not realize that he had interrupted this administration’s hunt for the perfect waffle.

Yes, waffles. This administration craves a really good waffle, but importing them from Belgium is politically out of the question nowadays. Importing Belgian waffles would offend the more radical members of the United Waffle Workers, who want to keep those foreign waffles out of this country altogether and doesn’t care if this our Great Republic has to start a trade war with Belgium in order to keep them out. The former junior Senator from Illinois received a huge amount of support from the U.W.W. and he isn’t likely to forget that help any time soon; there’s more than one amendment in the cap and trade bill that would protect the jobs of American waffle workers come hell or high dudgeon. But, in a classic case of how the mighty have fallen, the Belgian waffle is no longer the world’s standard when it comes to waffling, despite the waffle’s long pedigree in that country. No, we are the world’s greatest wafflers and Afghanistan is where all our best wafflers want to waffle. I am not sure why this is, but I am certain it must have something to do with Afghanistan’s wonderful climate and the hot Afghan women.

It was not always thus, of course; so few things are, you know. Once upon a time in America, no one would think of waffling, waffling being a pernicious vice like masturbation or being a Red Sox fan. Waffling was a loathsome foreign habit that undermined American youth and American morals, and undercut the philosophical foundations of American government. After a known waffler shot President McKinley in 1901, an outraged Congress demanded that the Immigration Bureau turn back any immigrant at Ellis Island whom they even suspected of having waffling or anarchist sympathies, and the Bureau rigorously enforced the rule: immigration from Belgium virtually dried up as it was almost impossible to find a Belgian, whether they were Flemish or Walloon in origin, who hadn’t waffled at some point in their life. For many who did make it through Ellis Island, the charge of waffling was a career ender; having someone call you a Communist was an easier fate to deal with than having the whole neighborhood know that you were a waffler. Everyone knew about the vile crimes the Waffle SS committed during World War II and no honest true-blue American citizen wanted to associate with such a person. People pointed the accused waffler out in the street and talked about them in cautious whispers, and frightened mothers pulled their children away from the accused waffler, lest the odious wretch contaminate their precious offspring with waffling and bad breath.

All of this changed in the 1960’s, when waffling became hip and the governing classes in this country took to waffling like nobody’s business. Congress organized fact-finding junkets to Brussels every other week as the people’s tribunes searched the length and breadth of that city looking for the perfect waffle, despite their knowing that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept track of their waffling and the ages and sexes of those our lawmakers waffled with. Waffling became big business, leading to the rise of the U.W. W. out of the ashes of the old Brotherhood of Pancake Makers. The waffling spirit now animates the present administration, which draws its ideological strength from that period and is not going to allow someone wants to get on with his business interrupt the great waffle hunt. So GeneralStan must wait for his troops while the administration thinks of new ways to make the perfect waffle and the leaders of Congress debate whether that waffle should have blueberries in it, or whether the blueberry waffle drenched with butter and real maple syrup would constitute too much of a stretch for the political sensibilities of the American people and hurt these guys’ chances of keeping their seats in the next election.

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.