GOP UNDER ATTACK!!! FILM AT ELEVEN!!!

Yesterday in New York City, Antifa vandals vandalized, which I think goes without saying, the one following the other like bread and butter, time and tide, and my brother asking me for money and my saying no--yes, the object of this sentence is coming, I promise--the headquarters of the Manhattan Republican Party, a building that also houses the regional headquarters of the New York State Republican Party. The vandals announced that this was the beginning of a series of actions against the GOP for their crimes against humanity and for disagreeing with the Antifa movement, which is unconstitutional and doubleplus ungood and more than vaguely un-American, it seems.  I find this event interesting in that I didn’t think that there were any Republicans in Manhattan to speak of, much less their being a group of them large enough to conduct actions against; my mind actually boggled at the concept when I read the vandals’ declaration in the paper. 

What caused my bogglement, assuming that bogglement is the word I am looking for here, was that I was certain that the last native-born New York Republican was a man named Hezekiah Smith, who died when I was a boy of six or seven[i], despite the best efforts of doctors and naturalists to save such a rara avis.  Mr. Smith was a hardy old soul of about 107, I think, and he could remember Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortege moving up Broadway in 1865 and how a very portly stockbroker from Cincinnati, Ohio almost killed him when he (the stockbroker) landed on the sidewalk in front of him (our rara avis) after leaping from a fifteenth story window on the day the market crashed in 1929.  Mr. Smith escaped death by stopping for a moment at a street cart to buy a pretzel with too much salt on it, a flaw that bedevils street cart pretzels in New York to this very day. Mr. Smith took a bite out of the pretzel and stopped walking down Wall Street long enough to spit a large chunk of salt from between his teeth onto the sidewalk.  A moment later the stockbroker arrived at Mr. Smith's feet, causing him (Mr. Smith--I don't believe that the stockbroker was contemplating the saltiness of New York street pretzels at that instant, no matter how portly he was) to lose his appetite almost immediately. In any case, being the last of his species, the American Museum of Natural History insisted on having Mr. Smith stuffed and mounted so future generations of New Yorkers could see what a native-born Republican actually looked like. And so it came to pass. Mr. Smith is still on display at the museum, in that long gallery where the curators have the wildlife of North America dioramas, and so children on school trips from all over the city can come and gaze with astonished eyes upon his kindly countenance and wonder how such an extraordinary creature ever found a home in New York City.

As for the New York State Republican Party, I was unaware that such an organized entity actually existed; I was always under the impression that New York State Republicans were more or less like a herd of caribou wandering aimlessly over the length and breadth of the Vampire State, especially in the vast areas of political tundra  above Interstate 84, and doing nothing of any great importance, albeit doing that nothing with a much better wardrobe than your average caribou has—those horns really have to go; they are just so last year, you know—and that every so often one of them got lucky and found themselves elected to high state office or under indictment, conditions that often go together in these parts.  So this declaration of antifascist jihad against the local GOP seems a little far-fetched to me, unless the point of vandalizing innocuous buildings in New York is to drive the tenants out so the vandals can rip the copper piping out of the walls to sell for drug money or to avoid the complications that are apt to follow should the violent left attempt to wage its drum-beating, slogan-shrieking, baton-wielding war in places like Texas, Alabama, or Mississippi, where the Republicans are a fairly well-organized bunch and whose membership includes large numbers of people who possess their own firearms. I am only guessing here, but I suppose that a good many of these antifascists are not keen on doing anything in any state where they have to worry about sucking chest wounds or a ventilated liver as a side effect of their freeing the world of fascism. So this might be why New York is stuck with an inordinate number of these little punks, although I must say that the bagels are better in New York than in Houston or Montgomery, Alabama, and that could be a reason a wary protestor might want to stay in the neighborhood and annoy the unarmed passersby here as they try to get to work through the moron-induced traffic jams. Lucky us.

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[i] This would be 1964 or 1965. You can work out how old I am by yourself; there’s no law requiring me to help anyone with mathematics.

Upstate, or Concerto Grosso in A Flat, not by George Frederick Handel

Upstate. What is Upstate? Why is Upstate such an important concept for those of us who live here in the Vampire State? And, most importantly, where is Upstate?  This last is a very important question, as many people in the Vampire State would rather have a body part removed without the benefit of anesthesia then have anyone they know think that they live or know anyone Upstate, and there are others who think wistfully that maybe they would be better off if somehow or other they could just get out of the New York City rat race and move Upstate, where the grass is always greener and the picket fences are always whiter and life is just easier somehow.  Sometimes, the same person can have both of these ideas about Upstate on the same day, but not usually at the same time. An event that cognitively dissonant will often cause apoplexy in laboratory rats, although whether it would have the same result with New Yorkers is unknown. Ingesting large amounts of caffeine is supposed to protect against such things, and if there is anything New Yorkers do better than almost anyone else is ingest caffeine. All right, maybe people in Seattle ingest more caffeine on a per capita basis, but there is no Upstate in Washington, so they’re not probably not the best people to ask about something like this.

Before we start defining Upstate, let’s define what Upstate isn’t.  The people in Buffalo, for example, do not consider themselves Upstaters; they live in Western New York, thank you very much, and they will have nothing to do with a faux geographical controversy that takes time away from them stuffing their pie-holes with spicy chicken wings at every opportunity. Similarly, the people of the Southern Tier don’t really consider themselves Upstaters either, given that they aren’t upstate from anything; you can’t really be an Upstater if the downstate involved is Pennsylvania. On the other hand, the people in Malone do consider themselves Upstaters, a choice forced on them by geography; you can’t go any further upstate than Malone without actually being in Canada.  People who live in Lawn Guyland are definitely not Upstaters and whether or not Westchester County is Upstate seems to be a matter of some debate, especially if you live in New York City; for Upstaters, on the other hand, Westchester and most of Rockland County are Downstate. Given that no one seems to know just where Upstate is, what is this upstate place that you hear New Yorkers go on and on about?

First, you must remember that Upstate is a state of mind. If you live in Greenwich Village, then everything above Fourteenth Street is Upstate. If you live on 125^th Street, then the Bronx is probably Upstate, even if your cousin Rosie lives there. Your cousin Rosie, of course, will argue that no way does she live Upstate and the people on the Upper West Side would probably agree with her; living in the Bronx makes you one of the bridge and tunnel crowd, which is the New York equivalent of the flyover people the coastal elites in this country don’t like to think about. Your cousin will think that the people in Westchester are upstate, largely because they don’t live in New York City, an entity that includes all of the five boroughs, as opposed to The City, which everyone knows means Manhattan. If you don’t know that The City means Manhattan, then very clearly you are from somewhere not only west of the Hudson River, but west of New Jersey as well, if such a thing is possible. But your cousin Rosie would be wrong about Westchester. The people there consider themselves Downstaters; Westchester and most of Rockland County are the city’s suburbs, filled with people who come from New York City and / or work in New York City and therefore cannot believe that they could be Upstaters themselves, not after spending their lives hearing that the people Upstate routinely hunt deer and rub deer dung on themselves to make it easier for them to hunt deer. They are commuters, after all, and not at all the sort of people who would gun down Bambi without so much as a second thought, even if Bambi is eating their hedges and their flower gardens and defecating all over their front lawns while knocking over their garbage cans. You know you’re an Upstater when you regard Bambi and his friends as a bunch of oversized hoofed rats and you have the will and the means [i.e. at least two hunting rifles, one for you and the other for the missus, or one carbon fiber hunting bow] of turning Bambi and his friends into venison meatballs, which are delicious with your spaghetti and a nice home-made tomato sauce. Yes they are.

After many a long year trying to figure this stuff out, the consensus of opinion among moderate people of all races and creeds hereabouts is that Upstate either begins north of Interstate 84 or north of Poughkeepsie and that we should all learn to live together despite where we believe Upstate begins. Unfortunately, the debate between the fanatical adherents of each point of view tends to be loud and vicious in the extreme, with the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office and the New York State Police often called in to quell the violence with truncheons, water cannon, and tear gas. The conflict arises because Poughkeepsie and the other towns along the river have many people who work in The City and so don’t really think of themselves as Upstaters, whereas almost everyone who doesn’t work in The City thinks of themselves as Upstaters. This is a very tricky situation for our local political class; they don’t want to alienate the commuter vote, who tend to have some money in their pockets, but on the other hand do not want to alienate the non-commuter population because they know that no Upstate politician has ever lost an election by running against The City. This is because all true Upstaters believe, in their heart of hearts, that New York State would be a much better place if someone in Albany could just figure out how to get rid of The City altogether.  This is economic nonsense, of course; the state would collapse completely without The City to prop up its finances; but many people believe economic nonsense; how do you explain the persistence of Marxism otherwise?

For my part, I think Upstate starts north of Poughkeepsie. I believe this for a number of reasons, none of which makes sense to the I-84 believers. First, the people in southern Dutchess County watch the New York City television stations. We are familiar with what goes on in The City whether we want to be or not. Second, Poughkeepsie is the northernmost station on the Hudson Line; if you want to go further north than Poughkeepsie, you have to take Amtrak. Third, the increasing suburbanization of southern Dutchess tells me that this area will be as firmly Downstate as Rockland County in a few years and we all may as well face that reality now. The idea will stick in the collective craw for a long while, no two ways about it, but some things, like death and sweaty underwear, are inevitable whether you like them or not. And so it goes.

Some good news, or at least I think so...

...and on the good news front, two more New York State Assemblymen have been indicted for corruption, although the idea that indicting a politician for corruption in New York actually constitutes news of any sort is a little odd, now that I give the matter a little thought, I have enough money to go to Paris (I think), and all of us here in our happy little burg are looking forward to the arrival of the 17 year cicadas, vast squadrons of which will be bursting forth out of the ground in a sex-crazed  megaswarm any minute now. (God, they are ugly little bugs, aren't they?) And last, and certainly not least, the public approved our budget and we are now looking forward to a week of temperatures in the sixties, not that those two facts are in any way connected with one another.

BLOODSUCKERS AND OTHER DEMOCRATS: Bedbugs are all the rage in New York these days, in the same way that radical chic and mau-mauing the flak catchers used to be. There’s scarcely a day goes by any more without some new report of bedbugs showing up in the local media and sometimes in their beds as well. And now I hear that there’s even bedbugs in the Waldorf-Astoria, and you now that when the grande dame of Manhattan hotels bows to a passing fashion then somehow or other we’ve reached some sort of very important cultural milestone and nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be the same way ever again. The bedbug has become so popular here that there is even a movement underway to get Albany to declare the bedbug the state insect, a job Joel Steinberg has held for many years. Strangely enough, I have not heard that the bedbug craze has reached Albany itself, but then bloodsucking is an old habit there and the arrival of a fresh batch of parasites would not unduly alarm the inhabitants.

Why bedbugs should be so popular this year is something of a mystery. Granted, fashions in insects change, just as they do for women’s hats and men’s suits (single breasted or double breasted, sir, or do you even care?). Only a few years ago, anyone who wanted to be anybody had spiders in their houses and made sure all the dinner party guests saw the creepy little things whenever the guests came for dinner. Spiders were the thing to have in your house, no doubt the result of the Spiderman movies, and the rarer and more dangerous the arachnid the more chic you would be. The traffic in black widow spiders alone almost brought that species to the brink of extinction and many arachnid counterfeiters did a booming business in painting funnel weaver spiders, an altogether harmless species, black, and then selling them as black widows to an unsuspecting public. This sort of thing would have gone on for years, had it not been for one more of the fickle public’s sudden twists and turns, a pivot that dropped spiders like a Pet Rock and made the praying mantis the headless king of fashionable insects. With the meteoric rise of the praying mantis, a phrase I’ve never really understood, given that meteors don’t rise, they fall, bathrooms all over New York resounded with the sound of the fashion conscious flushing their now terribly passé spiders down the drain. Not all the spiders died in their sudden descent into New York’s sewer system; I’ve heard stories that many spiders survived and flourished in the lower depths, with generations of spiders leaving behind webs so thick they ensnare rats the size of small dogs and even the occasional baby alligator now and again.

And before the spiders were all the rage, there was Beatle mania, which flourished for a few years in the 1960’s, and before that Crickets were big, at least until Buddy Holly died, and before him fleas were wildly popular, for reasons I am not sure I fathom at the moment. You would think that after all the misadventures the fleas caused in the fourteenth century, what with the little critters spreading the bubonic plague throughout the length and breadth of Europe and killing a quarter of the continent’s population, people would regard fleas as something horrific, something no sane person would ever choose to get involved with, like hard drugs or devil worship or the life insurance business, but you would be wrong. We are talking fashion here, boys and girls, and if fashion dictates that fleas are in this year, then fleas are in and you’d better have your fleas out where the cognoscenti, a word that does not come with a side order of marinara sauce, which is a bit of a cheat, if you ask me, can see them. Yes, fleas were everywhere in those days. There were flea markets to shop at and fleabags to put your flea market purchases in while you took in a flea circus and wished everyone a Fleas Navidad, which I always thought was a good name for a stripper. Vanessa Cardui is another good name for a stripper, combining, as it does, choreography and lepidopterology, but I digress here.

The spider rage lasted until the late 1990’s, when it faded from view at about the time the Lewinsky scandal struck. With a distracted press and a polarized political situation in the country, the spider went the way of the Nehru jacket and the liberal Republican. After that, the bug craze ended for a while. There were a few attempts to resurrect it; for a while everyone thought that the deer tick was going to be the next new thing, but the tick didn’t really go anywhere, despite all the type, and most of the best minds in advertising slowly, and very reluctantly, gave up and came to the conclusion that America’s long love affair with the bug was finally over. Bugs had finally worn out their welcome and gotten stomped on once and for all.

And then, just when bug lovers everywhere were about to despair and turn to quilting or collecting 15th century sports memorabilia, the bedbugs arrived on the scene, years late, to be sure, but still incredibly welcome, nevertheless. They are everywhere now; even the New York Public Library has bedbugs the size of the Cat in the Hat in all of its branch libraries, and the Met, the Met, and the Mets, have bedbugs piled up to a second violin’s knees. There are some holdouts—the Yankees will not abandon spiders and neither will the city’s Department of Corrections; the inmates on Riker’s Island apparently love their spiders more than life itself—but every other major institution in the city is laden with bedbugs and more than happy to let you know about it.

But the Yankees and the inmates will eventually surrender; the wave of bedbug mania seems too strong for any institution to stand in its way for very long. I’ve seen a good many bug crazes come and go, and to date I’ve never seen one with this kind of staying power. Of course, if DDT makes a comeback this craze will disappear almost immediately, but DDT is on the environmental movement’s list of seven deadly sins, which is good news if you’re a bedbug, but not if you’re a spider-loving Yankee fan. Now if the Yankees could find a bedbug with a great slider and willing to pitch middle relief, well, that would change everything, wouldn’t it? The Yankee management couldn’t let the little bug sign with the Red Sox, could they? No, they couldn’t: that would be stupid.

A DISTURBANCE ON THE CHAMBER FLOOR: Well, it was nice while it lasted, boys and girls, no two ways about it, but all good things must come to an end and I fear that our good thing is gone as well. For as long as living memory serves, we, the suffering citizenry of the Vampire State, have endured the rule of the three men in a room. For almost a month, we did not suffer from this particular ailment, as one branch of the state government had to disengage itself from their habitual gorging on the public trough long enough to figure out who the third man in the room ought to be. This is not a minor or an academic question hereabouts, indeed it is not, because I can best describe the government of this state as a three-legged stool; should any one of the three legs falter or fail, the whole malfeasant edifice becomes instantly unstable, quickly dumping the dumbass who tries to sit on said stool on his dumb ass.

How, you may be asking yourself, did things ever come to such an ignoble pass here in what used to be the most important state of all the states comprising this our Great Republic? This is an excellent question, filled with chills, spills, and adventure enough for the entire family, and one for which most of here don’t have a damn clue. I shall, however, attempt to provide some insights into the matter, as my not having a clue has never stopped me from having an opinion before and I see no reason why it should stop me now.

For many years now, for decades, in fact, the two major political parties have shared power in the state legislature: malfeasant Democratic peculators dominated the lower house, the Assembly, whilst grafting Republican boodlers ran the upper house, the Senate. The governor, of course, could be of either political persuasion; no one much cared what party he belonged to so long as the gravy train ran on time and everyone could go back for seconds, thirds, or as many ordinal numbers as they felt they could handle without a grand jury noticing. This bicameral arrangement of official goniffdom reflects the political geography of the Vampire State. The Democrats’ control of the big cities has given them the majority in the Assembly ever since Grover Cleveland hung his first villain, but as you venture away from the metropolis and the various micropoli along the river, the political naïf wanders into that strange land known as Upstate, where even the mice are Republicans, a situation that leads to the GOP’s control of the Senate. And so we all lived in a state of happy dysfunction for ages and ages. The state’s three men in a room was complete: the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the speaker of the Assembly ran the state while the members of the two houses voted the way their leadership told them to vote in exchange for the right to loot the public treasury on a regular basis. Only the bills the speaker and the majority leader wanted to pass ever came up for a vote and all a state legislator needed to do was vote yes. In the Assembly, the leadership brought this process to its logical conclusion: all assemblymen voted yes on every bill unless they were physically present to vote no. Since their actual presence was unnecessary, if not downright distracting to the Assembly staff, assemblymen could spend their time in more worthwhile pursuits, such as learning to play badminton or operating auto repair shops on the side while they waited the next election cycle. In 2006, however, this happy state of affairs came to an abrupt end. The Democrats, for reasons best known to the voters of the state, took a two-seat majority in the Senate. This means that all three men in the metaphorical room are Democrats, a state of affairs that hasn’t existed for a while here, and what’s worse, it means that all three men in the room are from…THE CITY!

It would be difficult, at best, to describe the depth of the loathing that many Upstaters have for The City and no upstate politician has ever lost votes denouncing The City as a prodigal Sodom and Gomorrah that wastes the money hard-working Upstaters earn on fiscal fripperies. Some Upstaters, lost in the fever swamps of their loathing for all things concerning The City, have even been known to voice a favorable, if sotto voce, opinion of the Boston Red Sox on occasion, as difficult as you may find that to believe.

In any case, since the beginning of the year the state capitol has resounded with the disconsolate cries of Republicans bewailing their lost power and influence, and the shrieks of paranoid Upstaters convinced that The City and all of its minions were going to spend the state into bankruptcy and not share the graft while they did so. What to do, what to do, has been the plaintive wail from the state legislature for the past few months, a cry that is now, frankly, annoying in the extreme and makes us, the inhabitants of this fun dystopia, want to smack these guys across the face a couple of times and tell them to pull themselves together, for crying out loud. And then, it happened.

No one is sure why it happened; the astrologically inclined say that Jupiter and the moon were in the right alignment, while a good many Marxists say that this affair was the product of a classic rift in the ruling classes, or they would if there were a good many Marxists around still calling themselves Marxists, and then there are the cynics, a plentiful tribe here in the Vampire State, who know that the whole thing was little more than a case of thieves falling out. What did happen, in whatever manner you choose to describe the reasons, was that two Democratic state senators, one a man with residency issues—he apparently doesn’t live in the district that he represents—and the other a man accused of allegedly beating his girl friend, announced that henceforth they would be voting with the Republicans, thereby giving the Republicans control of the state Senate, in response to which event the Democrats closed the Senate chamber down and hid the keys so the Republicans couldn’t get inside (this, strictly speaking, is illegal, but what’s a little illegality between friends?). The Democrats threatened to sue, declaring the coup illegal, and the Republicans threatened to counter-sue, demanding the recognition of the new majority and the legislative session continue. And so the nastiness continued unabated for weeks at a time, the crisis only solvable in either one of two ways—the rebels either stayed with the GOP or returned to the Democratic fold—but this being the Vampire State, where deviousness and rank stupidity form the basis of our political culture, our dogged crew of solons found a third way to solve the problem, which, of course, did not solve the problem and only made things worse than they already were, if you can imagine such a thing. I know I couldn’t, but then, I lack imaginative facility.

Now, the Democrats did not submit meekly to the will of the new majority, but then you already knew that, didn’t you? No indeed, the Democrats has waited for decades for Senatorial perks, privileges, and pelf, and they were not going back to the bad old minoritarian days without a fight. They went after their two Judases, promising them the entire world right up to the state line if only they would return home. After a couple of weeks of this, one of the senators, the one with the residency problem, announced that he would return to the Democrats forthwith, the better to figure out just where he was coming from; the other distinguished gentleman, on the other hand, refused to return, leaving the Senate in deadlock, with each party having 31 votes.

In ordinary times, this would not pose any sort of a problem. In such cases, the state’s lieutenant governor would cast the tie-breaking vote and ensure one party’s misrule over the other’s. These, however, are not ordinary times hereabouts. The Vampire State is, at this juncture, singularly lacking a lieutenant governor. As you may recall, the Federal authorities found the previous governor of this state with his socks on and his pants off in a hotel room discussing civil service reform with a young woman hired for the occasion. The first instance of said reform being the previous governor’s resignation, the then lieutenant governor became the governor, leaving his previous sinecure unoccupied. Unlike the Federal constitution, which goes into great detail about the hows and whys of presidential succession, the state constitution makes no provision for electing, appointing, or looking through the want ads for a new lieutenant governor, or, at least, this is what the Attorney General of the state says, a man who is himself angling to replace the current governor just as soon as the next election cycle comes rolling around. Why he wants to be governor is anybody’s guess; it is certainly beyond my poor powers of comprehension.

And so it went for almost a month. The governor, understandably upset that no one was going about the state business of spending money faster than a full keg disappears at a frat party, threatened to call a special session of the legislature and to keep everyone in the capital through the summer months and to dock the senators’ paychecks until both sides ended the stalemate, but neither threat worked. Modern air conditioning plants have made the capital a barely tolerable place, even in the summer, and I am fairly certain that the good senators have other sources of income available to them, he said with a completely straight face.

In the end, all good things must come to an end, and the senatorial stasis was no exception to the rule. Our alleged girl friend beating senator went to the mountaintop and communed with the spirit of Andrew Jackson, and then in a blaze of remorse and publicity returned to the Party of the People. That his confreres immediately raised their prodigal son to the dignity of deputy majority leader caused some cynics, including the governor, no less, to conclude that the whole affair reeked of illegality and quid pro quo, a charge the Democratic leadership angrily denied. The governor’s response was curious, though; after a lifetime spent in the noisome pit of illegality and quid pro quo that constitutes the political life of this state, you think he’d have gotten used to the reek by now. The rest of us have, unfortunately.

BUDGET BLUES: You may not know this, but here in our happy little burg a bicycle’s rear reflector must be amber. No other color will do: not scarlet, not strawberry, not crimson, not vermilion, not Kelly green, not even on St. Patrick’s Day; only amber will serve the purpose at hand. Now, in fairness to the always wise council of solons who govern our mighty micropolis, this particular bit of legal fluff was not their idea, although they might have come up with it if they weren’t busy plotting ways of injecting politics into the annual civic homage to the power of Gina DiNapoli’s breasts, of which more at another time. No, indeed, this legal privileging of amber over all other shades in the visible spectrum comes to us courtesy of the state legislature, an educational institution best known for annually demonstrating the concept of inertia to visiting high school physics classes. You see a lot of this sort of thing here in the Vampire State; worrying about the colors of bicycle reflectors (the reflectors on the front of the bicycle can stay red, for the time being) gives the assembled malfeasants who would otherwise be circling the state budget like a pack of starved lawyers at an accident scene the feeling that they are actually accomplishing something without actually letting them do anything, which would require them to bestir themselves and actually do something, and there’ll be none of that here, thank you very much. Here in the Vampire State we also have a state muffin (the apple muffin; we may graft, but we are regular), a state insect (Joel Steinberg), a state fossil (Mario Cuomo), and a state beverage (milk) that everyone in the state legislature is in favor of, just as long as they don’t actually have to drink the stuff. That’s odd, too, now that I think about it, given the power of the dairy lobby in this neck of the woods; you’d think the milk peddlers would come up with a forty proof chocolate milk, just to grab the legislators’ attention in between their prolonged bouts of looting and pillaging on the public dime.

In any case, the citizens of the Vampire State must endure this legal nitpicking because the legislature finds that it has precious little to do most of the time; our state, like all other states in this our Great Republic except Nebraska, which has a unicameral legislature, an arrangement that no doubt came about because those good and sensible prairie folk objected to shelling out their good hard-earned tax money to support not one but two sets of work-averse peculators, follows the organizational format of the Federal government, with its two houses and a chief executive and a snappy looking capitol building. This is what all of us who live here learned in the seventh grade, when the main focus of history class is the history of our state. This bit of civics instruction is, of course, pure nonsense; the Vampire State is a triumvirate, a government of three men: the governor, the senate majority leader, and the speaker of the assembly, none of whom like each other very much at the moment. There are other state legislators, to be sure, and I would like to think that some of them want to do a good job for their constituents, but you could drive a herd of sheep into the capitol building and get the same results that you get now. And better yet, sheep work for less than a legislator makes these days and during the spring and summer legislative sessions you can turn them loose in the public parks to graze, thereby saving a fortune in lawn mowing and fertilizer costs.

Now, the reason why none of these gentlemen like each other is fairly easy to grasp; it’s budget time and the state budget will be late yet again, just as it has been late for the past several decades. The reasons why the budget will be late this year need not concern us here; suffice it to say that pols in search of boodle exhibit all the table manners of an ill-bred shark in a feeding frenzy, and if they’re not trying to get money out of the taxpayers’ hide then they are out to give their campaign contributors in the much loathed special interests tax breaks that mere voters are not important enough to rate. At this point, Vampire Staters no longer wonder if the legislature will pass the budget on time, but rather how late the budget is going to be this year, a topic of immense interest for people from one end of the state to the other. Betting on when the budget will pass is a major part of the gaming industry here, with tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars put on dates from April Fool’s Day, which is when the legislature, by law, must vote on the budget, a date that, frankly, only suckers play, to New Year’s Eve, which is pushing the far edge of the fiscal envelope, but is not entirely outside the range of fiduciary irresponsibility, especially in this neck of the woods.

This year, though, there’s been a mad rush to get the budget in on time, or at least within spitting distance of on time, and so most legislators had to make some sacrifices, one of which was the pleasure of actually seeing what was in the budget before they had to vote on it. Usually, your average state legislator will get his copy of the budget out of the mail, peruse the table of contents and see if there’s anything worth reading, and then check the index and see how many times they get mentioned in this over-baked screed (they also want to make sure the printer spelled their names right) before looking over their shoulders and taking a quick look at the centerfold. This year the speaker and the majority leader thought that it would be better for everyone concerned if the legislators just skipped reading the budget altogether, as the budget can be a fairly boring bit of prose in need of a good Indian attack in order to hold the reader’s interest. Since, however, passing a budget without actually looking at the text makes people wonder why we bother electing a legislature in the first place instead of simply having the finalists of the state spelling bee legislate on the public’s behalf—they are available during summer vacation, if they don’t already have plans to go to Disney World with their parents and their annoying younger siblings—the speaker and the majority leader did make sure their legislative comrades each got a copy of this morbidly obese tome an hour or so before everyone had to vote on the contents; some legislators, bemused by this turn of events, pointed out to all and sundry that their copies were still warm when they got them, the ink still wet, and many a conscientious legislator wound up accidentally smearing charts and tables for subsidies to the state barge system all over their fingertips. Life is hard in the state capital, there’s no doubt about that, boys and girls.

But all is not lost, I hear. Rumor has it that lost in all of that verbiage there really is a good Indian attack; it’s in the ninth chapter, in between mandates for school bus purchases and a member item for a new state monument to Grandma Moses. After years on the warpath, the Trump Indians may finally get a reservation in their ancestral hunting grounds in the Catskills, and if you call now, you can get a reservation to see the grand opening of the brand new and absolutely spectacular tribal education center and casino. I know I want to learn all I can about Trump culture and show girls, and I’m sure you do, too.