Elections

 I have not written much about the current election season, which is to say that I have written nothing about the election at all, for which I do apologize. The comic possibilities raised by the lives and thoughts of the two main candidates are endless and I have chosen not to use them because I am very lazy. Therefore, I am resurrecting a post from 2004. No one liked it then; frankly, I am not sure if I like it now; but it is what it is and I am going to resurrect it from the Blogger boneyard.  Enjoy!!!

Well, the silly portion of the political season has finally arrived and not a moment too soon, I think; the voters can always use some diversion. This year we are all a-buzz about election signs and posters vanishing from roadsides the length and breadth of our happy little burg, vanishing with the rapidity of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies off the top of your grandmother’s oven. There’s no apparent pattern to the thefts; signs for Republican and Democratic candidates alike are disappearing during the dark of night with equal speed, with each side declaring that they are the injured party and blaming the other for the political pilferage. The local constabulary is now hot on the case, the gendarmes declaring that they will get to the bottom of the mystery posthaste and once again make our streets safe for politicians to annoy honest citizens.

Frankly, I don’t care if the signs ever reappear; the streets look just fine without them. I can remember the day when one such sign was put up on a telephone pole near a busy intersection on South Cedar Street, announcing that the gentleman running for office was an outsider, new to politics and, unlike his predecessor, who'd been in office for the better part of thirty years, not at all susceptible to the blandishments and corruption that come with political power; the poster finally weathered away halfway through the man’s third term in the state legislature.

And if the posted signs were in any way protected from the elements then they would never go away, remaining year after year until they became an embarrassment. One famously bald local politico had to paper over a poster like this at a bridge underpass; it had been there for years, reminding the voters that when they first voted the man into office he’d had a full head of hair and only one chin. Some politicians, on the other hand, do that sort of thing on purpose. You can save a lot of money on signs recycling last election’s signs for this campaign. It’s good for the environment as well.

I can see the point of stealing some signs. I’ve read somewhere that there are approximately 86,000 governmental bodies in the United States, the vast majority of which hold elections to determine who gets to run things. There’s so many state senators, assemblymen, aldermen, mayors, school board members, town supervisors, and library board trustees running at any given time that no voter can keep track off them all, and before long they all start to blur together in one's mind. The first time you really know who the candidates for some of these offices are comes when you see their names on the ballot. You have no clue who some of these people are, what with their signs disappearing left, right, and center, and in that case why not just vote for the incumbent, since you really don't want to waste your vote on someone you've never heard of and who was obviously not clever enough to steal his opponent's signs. Letting someone too dumb to steal his opponent's signs anywhere near the public coffers is not a good idea, I think; if he doesn't notice his signs are missing what else won't he notice when he actually has the job?

You don’t always need signs or posters to run for office. A few years ago my brother became the president of our local volunteer fire company, elected for reasons that surpasseth understanding, as the Good Book often says of the Lord when He goeth about smiting the hips and thews of passersby for no immediately discernible reason. My brother was a write-in candidate; he agreed to run because a firehouse faction, and yes, we have those here, needed a warm body in the race. My brother won, which everyone in the family found very odd, and makes one question the wisdom of the whole concept of universal suffrage. In the United States, candidates for public office run for that office; in the United Kingdom, a more politically sedate country, candidates stand for office. My brother is one of the few political candidates anywhere who sat on his ass on a barstool for office. He has since retired from the presidency, laying down the onerous burdens of civic responsibility and returning to a richly deserved private life, ending all too early a none too promising political career. He remains firmly ensconced on his barstool, however, offering sage political advice to all and sundry, which is what got him into trouble in the first place.

So for some, but not all, political races, stealing signs is not at all a bad idea. This, however, brings up the question of why anyone would steal the signs of the presidential candidates? Signs or not, it’s not like the populace doesn’t know who’s running, what with those two guys all over the evening news every night of the week and twice on Sunday. Still, you can never be too careful. I bring my Keep Cool With Coolidge sign into the house with me every night. You never know when you’ll run into a John Davis Democrat; better to be safe than sorry. People were awfully bitter about Davis' losing back in 1924.

Typed this up and forgot about it, or stuff that happens to Donald Trump

 

Well, things have gone to hell in an organic hand-basket here in the Vampire State, which is the norm hereabouts, just in case you did not know that, but this week has proven more norm than the week before that. A jury in the fifth-rate Gomorrah squatting at the mouth of the river that flows two ways has convicted Donald Trump, the erstwhile (or current, depending on who you talk to) President of this our Great Republic, of removing the tags from sheets, pillowcases, and mattresses at his hotels from one end of our amber waves of grain to another. This is a most shocking development, and if you are reading this in the presence of children, I would recommend that you send them out of the room quickly, lest you unwittingly corrupt their innocence forever.

The President manque cannot plead ignorance of the law; generations of Americans have known that the tags on bed linens and mattresses are inseparable from the mattress to which they are attached, and that the Federal government would fully prosecute all malefactors engaged in separating the tag from its pillow.. Sympathy for the ignorant, for the poor schnook just trying to get a good night’s sleep without that tag irritating his feet like a horsefly that keeps buzzing in his ears and won’t back off, even after the schnook’s 438^th attempt to commit blunt force trauma on the fly with a two-year old copy of Good Housekeeping magazine, is wasted on the likes of Mr. Trump, who knew what the law was and chose to play fast and loose with it (wow, you’d need a good pair of binoculars to see the verb from the subject in that sentence).

The jury was on to Mr. Trump’s desperate prevarications about those missing tags, thanks to the heroic police work of Officer S. Gregory, undercover bed inspector for the New York Police Department’s Tag Removal Squad. The Tag Removal Squad is an integral part of the NYPD’s Special Investigations Division, an elite group of detectives that investigates the city’s most sinister crimes. Officer Gregory, who plays the bass strumpet for the NYPD’s marching band when she is not prowling through the bedsheets of the Naked City looking for tag-rippers, spoon lickers, and various other members of the criminal classes, caught Mr. Trump colluding with Russian louts, thieves, and sundry other Slavic ne’er do wells to rip the tags off of the pillows at several Trump hotels in order to invalidate the warranties.  Why Mr. Trump would want to do this was not adequately explained at the trial, but the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case said that the crimes charged might have something to do with insurance fraud, unless they did not have anything to do with insurance fraud. You never can tell about these things, you know; it could be one way or another, unless you are not a Blondie fan.

Sight unseen

 "Democrats have demonized the Georgia law, insisting that there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election, despite the last-minute election rules changes due to COVID-19 and the Time expose about a “conspiracy” to “save” the election for Biden. While the Trump campaign was unable to prove in court that the former president truly won the election, that does not erase the serious concerns regarding election integrity that the Georgia law and other reform efforts address."  Tyler O'Neil, Townhall

And I weigh 185 pounds and look like George Clooney, just as long as I stay off the scale and away from mirror in the bathroom. Cases are hard to prove if no one looks at the evidence, or, in this case, wants to look at the evidence.

Dialogue

Beto: Bibi's a racist!

Bibi: What's a beto?

A beto, for those of you who may not know, is a slang term for an American of Irish descent who thinks he is a Hispanic, usually for reasons that no one can fathom, or to run for office in an area with a large number of Hispanics, which a reason everyone can fathom. (Full disclosure here: I am a person of Irish descent, although I do not think I am Hispanic, nor do I think I am Russian or even a Ukrainian pretending to Russian pretending to be Hispanic. I do, however, pretend to weigh much less than I do, a pretense I maintain by not looking at mirrors very often and avoiding weight scales as much as possible.)

Hispanic, for those of you who may not know about the minutiae of American racial classification, is an all purpose term first used in the early 1970's as a replacement term for Latino. The Census Bureau wanted a new term for persons whose ancestors came from the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America in order to keep their phony baloney jobs, to quote the distinguished American statesman, William Le Petomane, and I am sure that much thought and millions of man-hours went into the search for such a word. Hispanic comes from the Latin word Hispania, the Roman province that encompasses most of modern Spain, and has the benefit of meaning only those people who speak or whose ancestors spoke Spanish. Latino, you see, comes from Latinium, the province that surrounds Rome and that still exists today, I'll have you know, although with the transition from Latin to Italian the area is now called Lazio. This, of course, causes a problem with the racial spoils system as it exists in here in this our Great Republic: the authorities did not want to deal with white people named Lazio, diLazio, Romano, or DiRoma claiming social welfare benefits meant for Spanish speakers just because the word Latino makes it clear that Italians are not only Latinos, they are the original Latinos. No indeed, the word Hispanic makes it clear that what we are talking about here are honest to God Spanish-speaking people, which in the US of A usually means Mexicans, unless you are in Miami, where it means Cubans, or in New York, where it means Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Under no circumstances, however, do either of these terms apply to a Irish-American.  An Irishman, to the Romans, would be a Scotii or a Hibernian, and never a Latino, a Hispanic, or a Beto.

So why a beto and not a duck, you might ask. Beats me, guys, I'm a stranger here myself, although being a Beto is better than being a Bobby when one is running for office. Beto, when combined with an Irish last name, sounds vaguely exotic, like Bernardo O'Higgins or Santiago O'Leary, whereas combining Bobby with an Irish last name sounds like the name of a bartender in south Boston. When one is aiming at the former, the latter is something of a let-down. And that, Bibi, is what a beto is and why it's not a bobby.

PS. There's really so much one can say here about Betos, but I am trying to get myself back into the habit of writing here, so I will just ease on in with this little bit and try to go longer at some other time. I trust everyone is doing well and that all is well with the family. See you later.

Results and how to deal with them

It is wintertime, and the fish are not jumping—fish being entirely too sensible to that sort of thing at this time of year—the cotton is not high, although I am sure there are many who would disagree with me; there is a certain countercultural quality to cotton that one does not associate with such bourgeois fabrics as nylon or burlap; and Hillary Clinton is not the President-elect of this our Great Republic, which has the snowflakes in a bit of a tizzy.  They are blocking the streets, as snowflakes are wont to do, and they are refusing to acknowledge the results of the late election and demanding that the Electoral College refuse to elect Mr. Trump. The snowflakes are quite vociferous with their demands and have even taken to smashing windows in Oregon and playing with Play-Doh and petting therapy dogs to get their way. Now, I believe that there is nothing wrong with refusing to acknowledge reality; I have done it myself on more than one occasion. I remember the 2004 American League Championship Series, for example, where I could not make myself believe that the Yankees had blown a three game lead to the Red Sox and then spent much of 2005 refusing to believe that such a thing had actually occurred (I’m still not sure I believe it entirely, but I have stopped screaming at people who tell me that Boston won that year. Time heals all wounds…almost).  And I have spent the better part of forty years refusing to acknowledge that I could really stand to lose about thirty pounds, and I will thank you not to remind me of the fact, but the thing of it is this: I haven’t rioted in the streets because I didn’t get my way. I didn’t break any windows, I didn’t set fire to anything, I understood that life would go on.

I understood this in 2004, and I understand this now, because I know that there is something called objective reality. Objective reality, for the vast numbers of people who have apparently never heard of it, is that which exists independent of oneself.  There is such a thing, despite the best efforts of French philosophers to convince us all otherwise. Asia, for example, is there whether or not I have ever seen it myself or been there to affirm its existence. Asia does not need my affirmation in order to exist and the billions of people who live there do not care whether or not I accept the concept of Asia at all. Asia just is and my refusal to accept Asia’s existence does not change the fact that Asia is still there. 

Similarly, in the United States there is an institution called the Electoral College. It is an excellent institution—the menu could use some updating, though—and as venerable as few things are in this country that worships change, and it exists to elect the President of the United States and to give local political hacks a chance to go up to the state capitol for a couple of days and chase girls and get drunk on the taxpayer’s dime.  Recently, however, Mrs. Clinton failed to matriculate at this august institution and Mr. Trump did. That is a fact. That is objective reality, which is not wildly popular with snowflakes this year. For the snowflakes, this reality must, absolutely must, change. For them, the idea that Hillary Clinton is not going to be the next President of the United States is too horrible to contemplate and therefore this must change…because they said so.  That their ideas for how this happy outcome should occur are whimsical to the point of tweeness does not seem to bother the snowflakes, for no one has ever refused them before and they have no intention of permitting a precedent to start now. The snowflakes suggest, for example, that the electors of the Electoral College not vote for Mr. Trump, and have begun a campaign of pleading and only vaguely disguised arm-twisting to get the electors to change their votes. Yet others are suggesting that the voting machines in at least three states were in some way interfered with and that the results should be thrown out. I am sure that there are probably even more fanciful notions abounding in the dim alleyways of the East and West Coasts, but all of these notions have one problem: objective reality.  Did Mrs. Clinton win the popular vote? She probably did, and what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? The Electoral College elects American presidents and has ever since the first presidential election in 1788. Having the popular majority is nice, but it is not the point of the exercise. I would venture to say that if Mrs. Clinton had the electoral votes and Mr. Trump had the popular vote, these very same snowflakes would be singing the praises of the Framers and how wonderfully clever they were, even if they were dead white misogynistic racist bastards.  History records any number of faithless electors; there was once a mass defection of twenty-three, I think it was, from the Virginia delegation, said electors objecting to the Vice President-elect’s public relationship with a slave mistress.  This only happened once and I do not believe it will happen again, slavery having gone the way of all flesh.  As for the claims that someone interfered with the voting in three states, Carl Sagan once pointed out that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I do not believe, based on what we know now, that such proof is forthcoming. No, I think that the snowflakes will have to live with a President Trump, although I will admit that maybe something will come of this faithless elector thing; it is 2016, after all, and the Chicago Cubs did win the World Series, so maybe the impossible can happen here.  One never knows, do one, as Fats Waller used to say.

Fads and such

Fads come and go, of course; that is the nature of fads, after all—they are as temporary as Japanese cherry blossoms; and so long as the fad does no real harm to life, limb, or property I see no reason why we should not ignore the uproar until the fad disappears on its own. How many people today remember that the Pet Rock, leisure suits, and lava lights were once things no respectable household could do without or that millions of people once did the Macarena without once realizing that they were making complete asses of themselves?  Fads come and fads go almost as quickly, leaving us all more than a little embarrassed that we had gotten so caught up in something so fundamentally silly. On occasion, however, a fad comes along that is so clearly a threat to the public order that decent people must band together and put a stop to it before someone gets hurt, and I think I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that the current practice of dropping catfish on the heads of innocent passersby is such a fad.  Someone has to stop this now before a kid gets hurt. The catfish could put someone’s eye out, you know. It could happen.

I do not know why dropping catfish on unsuspecting passersby had become the thing to do these days, nor can I explain why this fad requires using a catfish instead of a cod, a flounder, or a box of frozen fish sticks. I assume that on some deeper, more profound level of existence being hit on the head with a catfish is funnier than being hit on the head with a smelt, a pike, or a humpback whale and a potted plant thinking, oh no, not again. Fads invariably have rules that are as ironclad as they are evanescent. For example, no one who wanted a Pet Rock could simply go outside, pick up a rock, and declare that said rock was a Pet Rock. Nor would taking said rock to a church and having it baptized Roscoe Le Rock, which is by no stretch of the imagination a French name. No, to own a real Pet Rock a petrophile had to go to a department store and shell out four dollars for the thing. And, in an early example of the evils of globalization, the rocks that all here in this our Great Republic fell in love with were all, and I mean every last one of them, Mexican rocks. It seems that there were no American rocks available; being a pet rock was apparently one of those jobs that Mexican rocks would do and American rocks would not. I hope that the people behind the catfish-dropping craze would have the common decency to use American catfish for these ichthyologic bomb runs, but it would not surprise me if they did not. The lure of cheap goods will trump the patriotism of many a good man, I fear.

And no, I will not bring up the silly season, which you may think I am going to because I used the word trump. Too many people have said too much about it and I see no need to add to an already vast sea of verbiage that is now threatening to swamp this our Great Republic’s amber waves of grain and get our feet wet. I think that we should all simply admit to ourselves that we have reached the final years of the American experiment and we may as well just kick back and enjoy the transition to a decadent monarchy as best we can. Waiter, I will have a Harvey Wallbanger with my bread and circuses, thank you very much.

P.S. My apologies for the prolonged hiatus; I had stuff to do and it needed to get done, so I had to take a break. Sorry.

My way or the highway

This remark from the former junior senator from Illinois intrigues me. He made it the day after his party suffered a wallopingly bad defeat at the polls: “To everyone who voted, I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.”  Now, as a proud scion of the Cook County Democratic machine, our prairie solon is familiar with the idea of representing people who are not really there. After all, dying in Cook County presents the deceased with the choice between heaven, hell, and purgatory—this last does not apply if you are not Roman Catholic—and mandatory induction into the Democratic Party; you may avoid two out of the three previous fates, although you can get to heaven from purgatory eventually, but that last one, I fear, is unavoidable.   The dead are a solidly Democratic voting bloc. 

So it is with this in mind that the Seigneur de Bourbon made his announcement. Since the two-thirds that didn’t vote clearly outnumber the one-third that did, he must champion the causes of the majority non-voters as opposed to the minority voters, who are clearly too stupid to understand what is good for them.  In short, his fingers are in his ears and he’s not listening to anything he don’t wanna listen to and you can’t make him, even if you go home and tell your mother. So there, take that, you Republican racist snotwads!