Squirrel hunting in Washington

Hi Chuck, I'm Brett and this here’s my pal, Neil, and we just come back from the woods out there in Maryland where we was a-shootin' them damn squirrels morning, noon, and night, and we want you to know that we heard your speech the other day and we thought it was a humdinger, you betcha! Why, I don't think I ever heard such a good speech before, no sirree Bob! The thing of it is, though, Chuck, me and Neil was wondering about this here price you was saying we was gonna have to pay. Now, we cracked out our copies of the Constitution and checked up on Article III (the three iii's, well, that's them ancient Romans' way of saying 3, which is understandable, not like V being their way of saying five. Nothing about a V says five to me, but I may just be missing something here) and right there in Article III it says that we get keep our jobs just so long as we behave ourselves and don't get drunk on a Saturday night and go shooting out the lights in front of the Capitol. It'll be a bit of a strain, but I think we can manage that. There ain’t hardly no point to wasting ammunition like that, anyways. So we're not too worried about the price we'll have to pay for getting crossways of you. After all, Chuck, we're both younger than you and we will, in all probability, still have a job here in Washington when you are dead and gone. Remember, Chuckles, we don't gotta run for nothing no more. So, we’ll be seeing you around and, just remember, stay away from them there squirrels!

Donald Trump is literally Hitler

As anyone who knows me will be more than happy to tell you, I am easily confused. I didn’t start out to be easily confused—I was rather hoping to play centerfield for the Yankees someday, but that dream vanished when it became clear that the curveball was a permanent part of baseball and not some passing fad like Pet Rocks, Cabbage Patch dolls, and Clinton presidential campaigns, and that my inability to hit a curveball with any degree of regularity, or never, as it is sometimes called, would permanently keep me out of centerfield at Yankee Stadium, unless I was taking the tour the Yankee organization provides when the team is out of town—but I am easily confused today, which I ascribe to being old and out of it, and to my unfortunate habit of wearing unfashionable hats.

But be that as it may, I am confused because President Trump is literally Hitler.  Not a would be Hitler or a Hitler manqué, as if he were a literally French Hitler; one assumes that the food would improve in school cafeterias if he were; or a wannabe Hitler or an aspiring Hitler or a Hitler avatar, but literally Hitler, and being literally Hitler is not a good thing to be. Now, other people have been literally Hitler before Trump was literally Hitler; Ronald Reagan was literally Hitler and both President Bushes were literally Hitler as well, as was John McCain and Milt Romney. Barry Goldwater was almost literally Hitler, but apparently he either got over it or the people who were thinking about saying that Goldwater was literally Hitler decided that calling him literally Hitler just sounded silly and contented themselves with saying that Goldwater was literally loonier than Hitler at a hot dog eating contest. I do not recall if Richard Nixon was literally Hitler; I am old enough to remember Nixon very well and I just don’t remember if Nixon was literally Hitler or if he was just sort of vaguely Hitlerish, but not during the latter half of football season.  I find the idea of Mitt Romney being literally Hitler intriguing in a strange sort of way; being literally Hitler suggests the idea that Romney had literally Hitlerian powers as governor of Massachusetts, like the power to dispose of his enemies as he willed or the power to invade such nonthreatening neighbor states as New Hampshire or Connecticut or even to arrest all the New York Yankees fans in Massachusetts and send them to summer camps on Nantucket Island, as opposed to the not very literally Hitlerish power to raise everyone’s health insurance premiums, which is very not literally Hitler-type power at all. Any idiotic dolt of a politician can do that, you know, and do it without the really cool uniforms that being literally Hitler can get for you.

One thing is absolutely true, however: Donald Trump is literally Hitler. That is an undeniable historical fact like Christopher Columbus discovering the electric light bulb or Fiorello LaGuardia discovering that secondhand tobacco smoke can give you herpes. Here, however, is the part that confuses me: if Trump is literally Hitler and Romney was literally Hitler, how can Trump be literally Hitler if Romney was literally Hitler, and how can both men be literally Hitler when Hitler was literally Hitler, and Hitler, you might be interested to know, still has living relatives who might sue the people who keep saying that Trump is literally Hitler and Romney was literally Hitler for infringing on the family’s trademark of being literally Hitler, or, in their case, literally Hitlers.  This, to me, is a lot like People magazine declaring that some male movie star is the sexiest man alive last year and then declaring another male movie star the sexiest man alive this year. How can the latter be sexier than the former when the former is still living?  I could understand this if the sexiest man alive this year was competing, if that is what you do in this situation, with the sexiest man alive from 1937, but last year was only last year and it’s unlikely that last year’s winner has diminished in sexiness so much that anyone can notice an appreciable difference between this year and last, and how does anyone measure such a subjective quality anyway?  Is there a cellphone application that will do this for us nowadays?

Finally, there is the problem that no one seems to want to deal with here. In declaring that Trump is literally Hitler, how do we judge the case of Adolf Hitler, who was literally Hitler long before it became politically fashionable to be literally Hitler?[1] If Trump is literally Hitler, then it necessarily follows that Hitler can’t be literally Hitler, he has to be someone else, doesn’t he, but Alfred E. Newman and Bill Gates are already someone else, and no, I don't know what that means. This, in turn, leads to the problem of why would anyone care if Trump is literally Hitler when clearly Hitler could not be literally Hitler because Trump is literally Hitler?  If Hitler can’t be literally Hitler because Trump is literally Hitler, then accusing Trump of being literally Hitler is as meaningless a charge as accusing Trump of being a life insurance salesman, or worse, a Red Sox fan.  So, I am still confused and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around willing to untangle the mental knot this conundrum is causing me. I must give the whole matter much more thought, I think.

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[1] I should also point out that being literally Hitler did not keep Hitler from literally shooting Hitler in the head. So, since Hitler literally killed Hitler for being literally Hitler, is this literally a good thing or a bad thing vis-à-vis Trump, who is literally Hitler but is unlikely to do the same thing?  I am still confused.

South of the Border

I don’t have much to say at the moment, but I thought I’d say it anyway. We are much confused these days between legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants, whom the press often refer to as undocumented workers, and I thought I might be able to do something to explain the difference.  The first category in the previous sentence is an actual category of people living here in this our Great Republic. Those people are individuals who obeyed American immigration law, applied to come to the United States, and jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops the collective Kafkaesque mind of the immigration bureaucracy could devise to come out on the other side with a legal resident card, the legendary Green Card, which I understand is actually a sort of off-peach color these days. They are, by virtue of their obeying the law and acquiring the off-peach green card, allowed to live and work in our country with all the rights and privileges of citizens of the land. The only privilege not extended to these good folks is that of suffrage, the franchise being limited to actual citizens and those who like KFC’s chicken. This is one of the great mysteries of the modern world to me; I cannot eat more than a few pieces of the Colonel’s cuisine without started to belch uncontrollably. I think I am allergic to at least one of the eleven secret spices in the original recipe. 

On the other hand, the category of undocumented immigrant (or worker) is a euphemism and I think I can say without too much controversy that the point of a euphemism is to not call something by its right name because its right name accurately describes the person or thing described and that accurate description is, for one reason or another, uncomfortable or inconvenient or politically incorrect. In this case, the politically incorrect phrase we are looking for is illegal alien. This is a short phrase, but it clearly shows that the person who bears the name is one, currently living and working in the United States of America in violation of the laws governing immigration to the United States of America, and two, a citizen of a country that is not the United States of America.  Hence, illegal alien. That does not seem so hard to figure out, I think, and when I am confused with the concept, a confusion progressives and capitalists alike choose to foster for reasons both political and mercenary, I simply remember that my mother and her brothers and their wives are legal immigrants to the United States and that the guys who are mowing my neighbor’s lawn as I write this probably are not.  Now, I am sure that the guys mowing the lawn next door are very nice people who want what’s best for their families, but so were my paternal grandparents and my mom and her brothers and their wives and they didn’t see the need to come into the country illegally. What the guys next door mowing the lawn are, in short, line jumpers, people who make the thousands patiently going through the process feel as though they are idiots for showing up for interviews and filling out questionnaires and doing the right thing when all they have to do is cut out the middleman and get across the border one way or another. So why bother doing the right thing? 

The purpose of immigration law, as I understand it, is to give the federal government a chance to look over the people who want to move here and determine whether those people should move here.  This is not controversial: every country in the world, with the possible exception of Germany these days, does the same thing.  There is no inherent right to enter and reside in the United States, unless, of course, you are an American citizen or a legal resident.  For all others, entry to this country is not a human right, it is not a civil right, it is not a constitutional right, it is not a natural right. Entry to this country is a privilege that the government grants and that the government can withdraw at any time the government feels necessary.  A temporary visa is just that: temporary. You get to come in, maybe study at an overpriced college that will be more than happy to charge you twice what they are charging Americans, or go take a look at the Empire State Building and the Grand Canyon, maybe catch a bus tour of the stars’ homes in Hollywood, or hang out in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras and grab some beads and flash your tits to the crowd down on Bourbon Street. And then you go home. I fail to understand what is so complicated about that, but then, I do not need cheap labor to line my pockets—I can mow my own lawn, thank you very much—nor do I feel the need, in Brecht’s catchy phrase, to dissolve the people and elect another in order to make sure I can win elections.  Asking that people obey the law didn’t used to be a matter of such contention; that it is now tells me that people want the law changed but know that such change is not possible; the people who already live here, you see, get to have a say in such matters, which seems to annoy a great many Masters of the Universe no end.

Home on the Gnome, or little people blues

Gnomes infest my home. I realize that this is something that your average American homeowner (like me, for instance) would prefer not to bring up in polite conversation—gnomes really do cause your property values to crater, especially in a tight real estate market—but the problem at my house has become so onerous that I had to do something about it.  Now, I should point out that I am not referring to garden gnomes, those happy little whatever they are that hang around people’s gardens and do not appear to be doing very much other than standing around in people’s gardens not doing very much. I have no problems with them; I am civil to them and they are equally civil to me; and I have no problems with that gnome you see on television all the time advertising travel services either. I seldom travel anywhere so our paths rarely, if ever, cross. Nor do I have any sort of problem with the rest of the little people: trolls, ogres, pixies, leprechauns (except on St. Patrick’s Day), hobbits, fairies, elves, sprites, etc., etc.—I get along with all of them.  Home gnomes, on the other hand, are a malignant bunch of ankle biting bastards and the sooner the pesticide companies come up with a way of removing them permanently from my house, our happy little burg, the Vampire State, and this our Great Republic the better.   

I do not know how home gnomes came to this country. I suppose that it may be the usual tale of immigrants from a foreign land escaping persecution or economic hardship or the ineluctable demand that you eat liver because it’s good for you, that’s why, the sort of story that brings a tear to the eye of every red-blooded American. Or, in an alternative scenario, the home gnomes could be like fire ants, killer bees, or kudzu—another country’s homegrown pain in the ass that somehow landed here and decided that being a pain in the ass back in the old country was not enough for them. America beckoned, and the chance to be a pain in the ass here as well was just too good for them to resist.  However the little bastards got here, they’re here now, and they’re in my house, and it’s driving me up the wall. 

So, you may be asking yourself at this point in this interminable screed, what is wrong with home gnomes?  How can anyone despise them? They are so cute and cuddly, in the adorable way that kitty cats, teddy bears, and hagfish are, surely no one could loathe them as much as I seem to do. My response to this is simple: baloney. Home gnomes, and I don’t think that I should have to keep pointing this out to people, behave one way when they are out in public and quite another when one is stuck with them as houseguests. Frankly, I would rather have a gaggle of gluttonous relatives come visit me over a long holiday weekend than deal with a home gnome, because home gnomes are like relatives you don’t like on steroids.

To begin with, home gnomes do not bathe. At all. Ever.  As a result, home gnomes stink in the same way that the men’s room of a bad Indo-Pak restaurant stinks after a long hot Saturday night in July, which is to say, completely and to the nth degree.  In the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries from New England tried to convince the home gnomes that cleanliness was next to godliness and showed the ungrateful little bastards how to use soap and water. Many a hoary old gnomish (assuming that’s even a word) traditionalist objected to soap and water, claiming that the stuff corrupted the morals of the younger generation and led them into such base and disgusting practices as broccoli farming and selling life insurance, but the protests of the greybeards did nothing to stop the popularity of soap and water, which the youngsters garnished with mint toothpaste and washed down with copious amounts of Listerine.   

I find the soap eating to be particularly revolting. There is almost nothing in this world more annoying than coming home from a long day at work to find six or seven unconscious gnomes fried to the gills on Listerine floating around my living room with their trousers pulled down to their ankles and large hydrogen[i] filled soap bubbles coming out of their rumps. This is, firstly, just plain disgusting—no one in their right mind wants to look at a home gnome’s bare bottom, not even female home gnomes[ii]--and secondly, it is hazardous in the extreme, since sober home gnomes—this has been known to happen[iii]—think that throwing lit matches at their drunken compatriots’ backsides while they hang in midair is in some way funny.  That throwing a lit match at a flatus full of hydrogen is not the best idea anyone could have on any given day—it could cause an explosion, after all, and a big one if there are more than one gnome involved—does not occur to home gnomes, largely because home gnomes are, collectively and individually, dumber than a box of wet rocks.  About twenty years ago, the board of education here in our happy little burg decided that what the home gnomes really needed, other than a good swift kick in the bottom, was an education. The noble experiment[iv] began with the best of intentions, but as most experienced teachers know, educating someone who does not want an education is almost impossible.[v] The gnomes cut all of their classes and spent their school days in the bathrooms drinking the liquid soap out of the dispensers and chasing pretty girls up and down the halls. In the end, the board of education admitted defeat and expelled the home gnomes en masse, but not before the gnomes burned the new high school to the ground.  

So, as you might imagine, I want to get rid of my home gnomes while my house is still undamaged. My mother recently had a deputy sheriff come out to her house to shoot a rabid raccoon in her driveway and I asked the deputy if she could come over to my house and shoot the gnomes as well. The answer was no.  She was very polite about it, but at this time there is no law against being a home gnome and therefore shooting one was out of the question.  She did provide a little hope, however.  The malfeasant peculators who run the Vampire State may not be the greatest supporters of the Second Amendment you could ever hope to find here in this our Great Republic, but if you pay for a license and wait for the proper season, the state will let you kill damn near anything you want to kill.  Well, it seems that home gnomes are an even bigger nuisance upstate than they are hereabouts—it seems that home gnomes are the leading cause of forest fires upstate—and there is now legislation before the Assembly to have a home gnome season run concurrently with deer season.  That’s it then, folks. The minute the governor signs that bill into law, I am going down the street to Don German’s Hair Cut & Hand Grenade Emporium to buy myself a shotgun, yes I am. I’m getting rid of the little bastards one way or the other.

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[i] Yes, hydrogen, not methane. They’re gnomes, not people.

[ii] Easily distinguished from their male counterparts by their shorter beards and the red rings on their prehensile noses.

[iii] Really, I’m not kidding.

[iv] Aren’t they always?

[v] I offer my brothers as evidence of this contention.