Phoniness and how to achieve it...

I must admit to a certain amount of befuddlement as I watched the former junior senator from Illinois first tell the body politic that he found out about the IRS scandal in the newspapers the same way everyone else did, which is strange when you think about it, given that the newspapers have been bending and twisting like a Mobius loop on LSD to avoid mentioning the story at all, and then only a week or so later, tell us all that the story was phony.  His personal sock puppet confirmed shortly thereafter that not only was the IRS story phony, so was any interest in the events that took place in Benghazi, Libya, on 11 September 2012. There was, in what has become the mantra of our erstwhile Illinois Incitatus’ administration, nothing to see here, please move on.  Now, I am as willing to move on as the next fellow, especially if the moving on will send me to Paris for a week, but at the moment I am still befuddled and no one in this administration seems interested in fuddling me. The Benghazi story involves the death of four people, including an American ambassador, which is not something that happens every day, and the IRS story involves a humongous government bureaucracy that no one likes using its power to go after people whose political ideology differs from that of Senator Whilom.  But I guess He knows better than the rest of us and so we must all go along with what He says.  If He says these are phony scandals then they must be phony scandals.  These matters are too complex for us ordinary folks to wrap our minds around. And all of God's children said, Amen.

Of course, the dimmest of dim bulbs can probably figure out from themselves that the violent death of an American ambassador qualifies as news everywhere in the world except in the United States, where any story that does not sing the hosannas of The One is published on page 43 next to the religion page, and that having the IRS call you in for an audit is an unpleasant experience akin to having root canal work done without the Novocain.  And then there is the spectacle of Ms. Lerner, the presidential myrmidon who did the Chicago Gang’s hatchet work at the IRS, invoking her Fifth Amendment rights before Congress. Now, I realize that as an American citizen that Ms. Lerner has the same right to invoke the Fifth Amendment’s provision against self-incrimination in front of a congressional committee or a court of law that anyone else has to invoke the Fifth Amendment in front of a Congressional inquiry or a court of law.  I, however, am not a congressional committee nor am I a court of law, which is good news for a lot of people in this neck of the woods, and so I get to say terrible things like the only reason a high government official invokes her Fifth Amendment rights in front of a Congressional inquiry is that she has something she really wants to hide from that Congressional inquiry.  That’s where the former junior senator from Illinois’ attempt to befuddle the American public goes a bit astray, I think.  Benghazi involves the sort of murky intrigue that you might find in a John Le Carre novel; this is the sort of deep wheels within wheels stuff that might take the average reader months to figure out. On the other hand, there’s no way to make the IRS thing look good.  Spin, you see, can only accomplish so much, and smoke and mirrors don't work very well if you've left the fan on and the windows open. The magic show only works if the audience can't work out for themselves what's going on, and in this case, they can. No one needs The One’s intervention and ever-wise counsel to know that He and His minions were doing something very fishy with the IRS. Simplicity can be very annoying, especially for the more flackish among us; simplicity, after all, doesn't allow for much wiggle room and these days the current maladministration needs wiggle room the size of the Louisiana Purchase just to get by. In any case, everyone is clamming up down along the Potomac, which is a small mercy, I think, given that you usually can't get these people to shut up, and you know that when these clowns all clam up at the same time or start yelling racism at the same time or start wriggling like worms trying to get off the hook at the same time things are starting to go south in a big way.  I am hoping for one gynormously humongous stink to start coming from this, but then again, I am easily entertained. Your opinion may differ.

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

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

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.

PARROTS AND THEIR USES: You may not have noticed this, but most people spend a good-sized chunk of their lives doing things that are fairly pointless. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a little pointlessness every so often; it goes well with French philosophy, especially the existential meat dishes, and there’s nothing better than a tasty bit of pointlessness with a good red French wine, but too much of anything is not good for the digestion and with a diet that rich you should not be surprised if you come down with the gout if you overindulge. And while monotony has its comforts, after all, the truth of the matter is that over an extended period of time monotony can slip inexorably from the comfortably numb to the excruciatingly mind-numbing, taking a large part of our sanity with it. In these circumstances, people will do almost anything to break the daily tide of tediousness, or, at the very least, reduce the tide to manageable proportions. Some people will take up a hobby like collecting stamps, coins, or eighteen year blondes named Bambi, while others trapped in the iron jaws of ennui will travel to some part of the world they’ve never been to before in order to take pictures of foreigners screaming at each other in a strange language before they start taking potshots at one another for reasons that not immediately discernible to the naked eye. In any quarrel, it’s usually best not to think too much about the reasons for the quarrel; most quarrels do not stand up well under close examination and, as the great Irish philosopher Sir Lucius O’Trigger once explained, most people like their quarrels as they are; trying to explain the quarrel rationally would only serve to ruin it. All of these hobbies have at least some small merit—they will break up the general monotony of life, especially that bit with Bambi after your spouse and her lawyer find out—but I find that there is nothing that will break the stifling monotony and purposelessness of daily existence quite as well as training a parrot to do root canal.

I know what a good many of you are thinking to yourselves right now—what possible advantage could anyone derive from training a bird, any bird, much less a parrot, in the subtleties of root canal? I do not have a good answer to this question at the moment; I am sure an answer, and a very good answer it will be when it finally arrives, will come to me shortly, just after it picks up its luggage and goes through security and gets its passport stamped, but at the moment, I fear, you will have to do without an answer or your lemon danish. I’m not sure how lemon danish figures in all of this; it’s almost certain that you can’t have any with your French philosophy and I don’t even want to think about what’ll happen if you ask for a bottle of ketchup.

Obviously, for those of you who may want to take up this hobby, there are a few problems to overcome. I know that I had a whole slew of obstacles in my way, the first of these being that I don’t really know anything about how to do root canal work. I’ve had root canal done, in my case by a woman dentist who did her best to put me at ease about the procedure between running out to smoke Camels and calling her bookie to put bets on Philly’s Folly in the sixth up in Saratoga, but sitting in the cheap seats at Yankee Stadium does not mean you get to hit in the clean-up spot, and so I began my career in avian education with no small degree of trepidation granted by a degree mill in the state of denial. However, ignorance of the subject matter is the last refuge of the intellectually callow and, frankly, a flimsy excuse not to do something. Christopher Columbus, for example, didn’t know where the hell he was going in 1492 and still managed to arrive in the Bahamas before the tourist season began and to have the capital of Ohio named after himself before Donald Trump fired him for not staying at a Trump hotel, as Columbus’ contract with the Donald required. All Charles Goodyear wanted to do was to perfect a whoopee cushion that smelled as bad as it sounded. He spent years trying to perfect the thing, mixing the raw rubber with hair, onions, dirty sneakers, a teenager’s unwashed laundry, used car salesmen, and finally sulfur. Goodyear tossed a handful of the stuff into the pot, having no idea that he was about to unleash the miracle of vulcanization and its logical consequence, the automobile tire, which will help you get a girl alone, preferably in some shady wooded area far from the madding crowd and the eagle eye of her mother, and the condom, which helps the girl you got alone stay alone. Goodyear’s dream of the olfactorily as well as the audibly disgusting whoopee cushion, however, had to wait another hundred years or so for someone whose name is escaping me now to invent. These men and thousands like them had no damn idea what in the hell they were doing and their names have gone down in history, while tens of thousands of men who did know what they were doing have vanished, their names unknown to posterity, after they did the sensible thing and wound up spending their lives peddling life insurance to the easily duped. That’s what listening to your parents will get you and don’t you ever forget it, buster.

There are, in the periodontal training of parrots, a number of problems you will need to address right away. The first of these is the parrot’s basic lack of sympathy for human dental problems. Parrots do not have dental problems, as they do not have teeth; they have a powerful beak, which is a sensible two-piece system capable of cracking open any seed you care to think of and which the bird can also use to pop the cap off of any brand of bottled beer sold in the United States, either foreign or domestic. In the past, parrots could also open cans of beer with alacrity in the absence of a can opener; however, the invention of, and the now near ubiquity of, the pop-top can has rendered this service unnecessary, if not completely obsolete in our more modern age. Being clever enough to open our own beer cans, parrots cannot, as a rule, see any reason why we should need their assistance to perform root canal. Parrots understand that the human beak, as they think of it, is an internal rather than an external organ, but they fail to grasp how any species that considers itself the paragon of animal evolution could get stuck with such an unwieldy thirty-two piece dining room set and with no means of returning the set for a refund. Getting the bird to understand that there is, in fact, a vital need for his /her services is the first step to successfully training your parrot. The parrot will not sympathize with the human dental plight, but they are willing to go along for the ride, particularly if there’s a free meal involved somewhere along the line.

The next great hurdle for the hobbyist to overcome is the parrot’s willful lack of an opposable thumb. Parrots do not have thumbs, as they regard thumbs, opposable or not, as unnecessary as well as unsightly. Parrots do have wings, which are often brightly colored and help parrots fly up to the telephone wire directly above your freshly washed and waxed car, the better to crap all over your roof, but wings, brightly colored or not, are a poor substitute for a thumb. The ability to fly under one’s own power is not really a required skill in almost any branch of dentistry you can think of, except for hovering, which eliminates the need to have the patient turn their head this way or the other. Parrots, however, cannot hover; only hummingbirds can hover and hummingbirds are essentially untrainable, except for some specialized fields such as computer science and tuna fishing, where they excel. Parrots prefer to use their beaks and feet for any operation that requires them to hold on to something, so when the trained bird actually performs the root canal on a patient, the patient will need a general anesthesia during the operation and some first aid afterwards in order to staunch the facial bleeding. Parrots find it difficult to operate from a perch while operating and prefer to stand on the patient’s shoulders or face during the procedure, digging their claws into the patient to make sure they don’t fall off.

The last great problem, the one that is greater than the parrot’s lack of reading skills or their inability to add past the number seven and one that I would ordinarily not bring up in such an open forum, is their constant need to take hits off the nitrous oxide. In any scenario involving a parrot and dentistry, a human must handle the anesthesia. This is a given. If allowed to have their own way, no parrot would ever see a patient. They would lock themselves in a room with ten or twelve or twenty of their closest friends, open the valve on the laughing gas all the way, and fly around the room at top speed singing dirty songs until they started bouncing off the walls. Nitrous oxide addiction has ruined the careers of thousands of promising psittacine periodontists and taken a terrible toll on their families. If you decide to take up avian periodontics, you must, must, must keep your parrot away from the nitrous oxide. If you do not believe you can do this, then I advise you to take up some other form of recreation; avian dentistry is clearly not for you.

But for all of its difficulties, training your parrot to do root canal can be a great deal of fun and incredibly lucrative as well. There are millions of people who have no dental coverage in their insurance plans and who wouldn’t mind having an otherwise very expensive operation performed for literally peanuts, which the patients will have to buy from you at hugely inflated prices. The American Dental Association, of course, hates the very idea of parrots performing root canal, but they would, wouldn’t they? Their psittacine loathing hasn’t stopped them from investing in Ritz Crackers or Planter’s Peanuts, has it? No, it hasn’t, not by a long shot. Hate the birds or no, the ADA knows that parrots will be dominating root canal work in ten years or so and they are getting ready for the changeover. The parrots, of course, are looking to move on up in the world. Today the teeth, tomorrow the tonsils, and finally, the world! Well, maybe not…