Stormy weather, or how things change

I noticed something years ago about the sexual revolution: by the time I arrive to take part in the seminal social conflict of our time, the revolution has packed up and moved on. This happens to me a lot, I fear, and it is tremendously disheartening to be always a bridesmaid and never a bride. So you can imagine the joy I felt when news of the Stormy Daniels affair broke. I was finally going to fight the narrow moralistic bluenoses who couldn’t stand the idea that someone here in America was enjoying a bit of fluff on the side. I mean, really, didn’t we all go through this twenty years ago? Wasn’t there a national uproar about a President lying about extramarital sex?  Didn’t Congress impeach the President and the national life of the country come to a near halt so that we could all learn more than we really needed to know about the President’s sex life and what the meaning of is is? Didn’t anyone learn anything from that experience? 

Apparently not, so this time I was ready for anything the dirty-minded neo-Comstocks had to throw at me. The President’s affair, if you can dignify a one-night stand with the title of affair, was consensual on both sides. President Trump saw a chance to grab some you know what and Ms. Daniels was not averse to having her you know what grabbed, so what’s the harm here?  It was just sex, after all, and sex in private is the business of the people involved and no one else. Yes, it was adultery, and adultery is on the Top Ten list of things that people should not do, in particular a married man whose wife has just given birth—there’s no way the guy in this situation comes off as anything other than a complete and utter sleazeball—but then again, none of us is the Lord and therefore who are we to judge?  Remember that the Bible says that it is better to pull the speck out of a neighbor’s eye than to pull a beam out of the eye of a Camel, especially an unfiltered one, and don’t you forget it, buster. Moreover, we should remember that the President was not the President then and that Ms. Daniels was not some poor naïve teenage girl duped or bullied into dropping her panties in front of a movie camera; she was an experienced performer with a lengthy filmography behind her. So how is this anyone’s business but theirs?  I think it is time we all took a deep breath and just moved on.

Well, I may think it’s time to move on, but it seems that I am the only one who thinks so. I went forth to battle the new Puritans who seek to oppress us all with their retrograde religious morality and found that they agreed with me, for the most part, and that the sexual revolutionaries were the ones foaming at the mouth about what two consenting adults chose to do with their genitalia. I found this more than a little confusing, to say the least, and so I had to sit down and eat Chinese food (the roast pork with broccoli and wonton soup were very good, thank you for asking) in order to relieve the cognitive dissonance and sort out just what in the blue blazes happened here in this our Great Republic while I was not looking.  Someone changed the rule book somewhere along the line and no one bothered to tell me that Comstockery was back in fashion. Well, everything old is new again, as the saying goes, and there is no new thing under the sun, but I cannot help but notice that the new version of Comstockery is remarkably like the old libertinism complete with extra servings of wanton soup, with the singular difference that the new Puritans didn’t mind when a President they liked and supported did this sort of thing while he was actually President and they do mind a great deal when a President they loathe and despise did the exact same thing when he wasn’t President.  Nearly a quarter of a century separate the initial inaugurations of these two men and much can change in a quarter of a century: the Internet barely existed in 1993, film photography was photography, I was forty pounds lighter—really, I am not making that up—and so I am sure that this sudden concern for the private morality of public people is the product of a generation’s coming of age and rejecting the immature ideas and commitments of their salad days. Or the new Puritans could be just a bunch of sleazy hypocrites. That’s always a possibility, you know, especially if you are cynically inclined, as I tend to be.

The Canard Conspiracy, only vaguely by Robert Ludlum...or someone like him, only still living.

Now that all the screaming over the Duck Dynasty kerfuffle has finally died down, I am going to put my two cents in. I know that I am a little late to the game here, but then again I usually am: I expect to be annoying people ten years from now about what a hoot Jerry Seinfeld’s show about nothing is, and I fully expect that people will be rolling their eyes about how funny that whole master of your own domain thing is. I guess I should have watched the show the first time around; it would have done wonders for my social life then, but at the time I was catching up on the reruns of All in the Family.

But what I find really interesting about l’affaire canard (yes, I am practicing my French here—sorry about that) is how a fairly standard exercise in American political kabuki theatre went off the tracks this badly.  At this point, I think, we all know how this sort of thing is supposed to play out: someone on the political right says something that someone on the political left, or one of their pet groups, finds offensive and starts hollering about it anywhere they can get an audience to listen. Whether or not they are really offended is beside the point here, as is whether the offending speech was actually offensive; being a niggard still has nothing to do with black people, no matter what the word sounds like.  Since freedom from offense is one of our constitutional rights (really, it is. I am sure it’s in the Constitution somewhere. Just look under the penumbras or behind the emanations, and while you’re there, could you take a peek and see if I left my mother’s recipe for soda bread in there as well?  Thanks a lot.) the minions of the offended group will let their media mouthpieces know that they are highly offended and deeply mortified and that they will demand that their offender make a full and contrite apology for his heinous crime, promise to never do it again, and slink out of the American public square, never to be heard from again, while the left and their minions gloat and cheer and pat themselves on the back for protecting the American public from the hurtful blatherings of yet another right wing troglodyte.

So why didn’t this scenario, a scenario we’ve all seen play out more times than we care to remember, happen this time?  My crack investigative staff has uncovered a memo from the A & E Network that might shed some light on the matter; I am publishing it here for the first time anywhere.

To: All Executive Staff

From: Executive Vice President for Programming

Re: Our Duck Problem

First, I want to thank everyone at the network for the way they have handled the Robertson controversy.  It has been a tough month for everyone involved and I know that you have done your best to protect the best interests of the network, our shareholders, and our corporate parents. Having said that, if our object in this whole matter was to make ourselves look like a gang of witless morons, then we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. We have managed to unite gay rights activists and evangelical Christians in mutual loathing of the A & E Network, and while I think that uniting two such utterly disparate groups in a mutual anything is no small achievement, I would have preferred that some other network accomplish this great feat instead of us.  The question for us now is this: what have we learned in all of this and how do we keep it from happening in the future?

Here are a few points I will want to discuss at our next meeting.

1. We keep all media away from Phil Robertson at all times, without exception.  Really, people, did no one on site in Louisiana notice that GQ was interviewing Phil Robertson? Didn’t anyone down there ask themselves why GQ would be interested in the views of a man who sports a foot-long beard and dresses in camouflage 24/7? Did our Louisiana people think that GQ wanted Phil’s opinions on the new spring fashions?  The writer wanted him to say something the GQ home office would find absolutely outrageous, and hellfire and damnation for practicing homosexuals and wondering why a man would prefer another man’s anus to a woman’s vagina definitely fits GQ’s definition of outrageous. That the former has been Christian dogma for the past two millennia and the latter something all straight men not serving time have wondered about at one time or another is beside the point; both opinions come under the heading of things we do not discuss publicly. From here on out, no media goes near Phil without my personal okay on it.
2. Second, regarding the possible boycotting of Duck Dynasty / Duck Commander products by GLAAD.  Please, who’s kidding who here? I will go out on a limb and guess that the number of gay rights activists who are also duck-hunting, card-carrying members of the NRA is probably miniscule almost to the point of nonexistence. In short, this is not something we have to spend a lot of time worrying about. On the other hand, the number of duck-hunting, card-carrying members of the NRA who do watch the show and buy Duck Dynasty / Duck Commander products comprise a good-sized chunk of the show’s audience. Second, most of that market share agrees with Phil and will boycott the show if we don’t put Phil back on the air.  So what does this mean for us?  I don’t think I have to remind everyone who works here that A & E is a capitalist enterprise: we exist to make money, the more money the better and truly obscene chunks of pelf are best of all. Catering to the politically correct is all very well and good if it keeps them off our backs, but we are not gutting the golden goose in order to satisfy anyone’s sense of moral outrage.  Not going to happen, people, remember that. I realize that retracting Phil’s suspension from the show will make the network look like we have no moral backbone at all, so let me repeat my previous point: the shareholders do not care if we have moral backbones, unicorn horns, or prehensile penises. They want their dividend checks on time and making sure they get them is what we are here for.  Keeping the gay rights people happy is nice, but it is not the point of our particular exercise.
3. I bought the program, so this one is totally on me, but I think there’s something for all of us to learn here.  I bought the program thinking that we were getting an updated version of The Beverly Hillbillies and that the audience would get a good laugh at their antics down there on the bayou. Well, the laugh’s on me here. People are not laughing at the Robertsons, they are laughing with them.  So what is the lesson here?  Understand what you are buying.  I bought this program thinking that we were getting one thing and in reality I was buying something else entirely; I should have realized that before we were up to our hips in dead ducks.  The Robertsons are a tight-knit evangelical Christian family that believes in all the things such a family usually believes in, including those things that aren’t going to make them hugely popular in New York City and California.  So in the future this network will not be airing any more programming featuring tight-knit evangelical families.  Unlike a conventional television cast of actors, most of whom would gut their own mothers with a dull fish knife in order to advance their careers, a tightly knit family will always present a united front to an outsider threatening the group interest and will use the Bible to justify their pigheaded refusal to see reason.   In addition to this, the Robertsons are an American success story whose collective worth, I’ve read in reliable financial sources, is approximately $83 million.  Let me repeat that for those of you not paying attention: $83 million. Yes, there is a lot of money in killing water fowl, no two ways about it, a lot of money, the kind of money that buys the person with that kind of money a lot of immunity from the kinds of pressure the network usually brings to bear on a recalcitrant star in order to get them to conform to our view of the common good. Therefore, in the future the network will not be featuring any programming featuring tightly knit evangelical Christian families with the financial wherewithal to tell the network where to go stick it.  We will concentrate on programming featuring poor people, preferably very poor people who will do anything to stay on television and keep the money coming in.  We need to control the talent, everyone; otherwise, all you get is this sort of anarchy.
4. Yes, this whole thing makes us look incredibly bad, there’s no getting around that, so when the media asks us for a comment, we’re just going to say nothing in as many words as possible and tell everyone that this situation was unfortunate. Unfortunate is this network’s mantra until this tempest in a teapot blows over.  If the gay rights people criticize us for our stand, that’s unfortunate as well, but tell them publicly that we sympathize. Privately, we say that all Phil wants is for America’s gays to repent and amend their lives; remember, if they were ducks, he’d be trying to blow their heads off with a shotgun, so tell them to count their damn blessings.

The rest of the memo dealt with matters that did not concern the Robertson affair, so we had redacted them in the interests of brevity. We have made several calls to A & E to ask for their comments on the memo; they have not returned our calls, except for a short statement saying that the memo is not an accurate reflection of the views of A & E’s senior management. Since then, all I've heard from them is the sound of crickets chirping happily away. That may mean something or maybe it doesn't. I only report; you get to decide what it all means.

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.

The civil service, or how to stay out of the slammer, in one easy lesson

My apologies for being nearly invisible here for the past few weeks, but the best laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley, as Robert Burns put it. Life has a nasty way of imposing its own demands on one’s writing schedule, whether you want it to or not, or even if you know what agley means or not; I know I don’t.  This morning my co-workers here at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread reminded me that I have been laboring here for my daily bread  for twenty-six years, yesterday being the anniversary of the inglorious day that I first wandered into this dump as an employee.  This, plus the fact that we have had a slew of recent retirements here, now means that I have been laboring here longer than anyone else has been laboring here, which in itself, apart from the actual number of years I’ve been doing this, is pretty damn depressing.  Combined with the actual chronology, it was enough to make me vaguely suicidal in an annoyed sort of way. I tamped down quickly on my immediate urge to sever an artery with my own teeth and went out for some pizza.  There’s not much that a nice hot slice of pizza can’t make better, and if can’t actually make it better, pizza makes the bad news seem less depressing.  I’m thinking of wangling the pizza concession on the Day of Judgment; I figure the saved will like a nice hot slice to celebrate and the damned will need something to lift their spirits before they become toast on a more or less eternal basis. 

In any case, I should point out that twenty-six years in the civil service has convinced of one great lesson: no matter how well you’ve covered your ass, you can always cover it better.  This leads inevitably to the scandals the Internal Revenue Service has gotten itself embroiled in.  If we listen to the big shots in Washington, the targeting of the Tea Party in particular and the American conservative movement in general was just something those crazy kids out in Cincinnati dreamt up all by their lonesomes without any sort of input from the head honchos, and especially without the input of anyone within breathing distance of the former junior Senator from Illinois.  Yes sirree, no one here in Washington was involved at all.  Cincinnati is out there in flyover country, Mr. Chairman, and flyover country is a nice place to visit, or so people have told me who’ve been there, but I’ve never been there myself and I’ve never talked to anyone who has.  They do strange things out there in the Ohio River valley and it may be the fault of the funguses.  I have to tell my rheumatologist if I ever want to go to the Ohio River Valley because there are funguses there that might interfere with my medication, so no, I couldn’t tell you why those people out there might want to do this sort of thing.  It’s Ohio, Mr. Chairman, and they do things differently out there.

The problem with blaming the frontline civil servants is this: it’s bullshit.  Sorry if that offends, but after twenty-six years here I can tell you that no one, but no one, at the frontline level of the civil service, even someone in as small a shop as my egregious mold pit, sticks their neck out like this without someone higher up in the food chain telling them to do so.  The only times I have ever gotten my ass chewed out big time here is when I cut people slack I shouldn’t have in direct violation of the policies spelled out in our staff manual.  It is inconceivable to me that long-time civil servants working at the Federal level in an agency like the IRS just did this because it seemed like a good idea at the time and because they didn’t like the political opinions of the applicants; their jobs do not include vetting groups on the basis of partisan politics; civil servants are not, or at least they shouldn’t be, in the business of helping one party or another win elections.  No, the only, and I mean the only, way the people in Cincinnati did this is because their politically appointed bosses in Washington wanted this to happen, and they only way those bosses gave them these orders is because they got the approval from the top.  There may not be a smoking gun in this case, but there is no possible way that people at the frontline, the middle management, and the top tiers all decided to break the law and suppress the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans without our erstwhile Illinois Incitatus and his clique of Chicago political thugs giving them the go-ahead.  Civil servants do not think outside the box, folks, we are one with the box, we are in psychic unity with the box, we are the box. We don’t do things that can cost us our jobs, our pensions, and land our sorry asses in prison spontaneously. We just don’t, that’s all.

BAD TIMES IN THE HALLS OF POWER: Scandal, yes, loathsome and always dreaded scandal has come to our now not so happy little burg, and I find it shocking and more than a little distasteful to have to report such reprehensible goings on to the public. But truth will out, as Thomas Edison didn’t say either before or after inventing the electric light bulb—he didn’t even say something vaguely similar to that, if you want to know the truth, although he was heard complaining about an intense case of flatulence that made his intestines sound like an amateur tuba quintet playing something by Vivaldi for the better part of a week—and if you do not hear such news from an impartial observer like myself you may hear the news from scandalmongers, gossips, and possibly even such vile creatures as life insurance salesmen, and who knows what type of spin they will put on the story in order to make it sound even worse than it is.

I will grant you, however, that it is difficult, at best, to imagine a set of circumstances in which someone could make the police arresting the mayor of our fair micropolis for assaulting a real estate developer with a fully charged fire extinguisher during a meeting of the City Council sound worse that it really was, but I am sure that someone with enough imagination could do just that if they really wanted to. And I would be remiss in my duties here if I did not point out that the mayor was provoked almost beyond the limits of human endurance, and that, frankly, both the developer and the nuns had it coming. The facts of the matter are these: last Thursday, at the semimonthly meeting of the solons who govern our fair community, the question of what to do with the nuns came up for the millionth time. The good sisters are leaving us—their order has decided to sell their convent and move them to another house further upstate—and so the question of what to do with the land the convent now stands on has turned the usual placid flow of municipal politics into a raging torrent of hatred and recrimination. One faction is for turning the whole area into a park, another wants to sell the land for development. I will not bore the reader with the ins and outs of this dispute; suffice it to say that the mayor wanted a new city park and the rest of the board wanted development and the mayor lost this argument big time, and I mean big time; he lost this vote by a wider margin than we denizens of the egregious mold pit lost the vote for a new library, and I didn’t think that was possible in any city-wide election unless the dead voted too, which they are sometimes wont to do in this neck of the woods. Our happy little burg is a very inclusive community, unwilling to damage the patriotic self-esteem of even the most deceased of our citizens, and so we are one of the few places in the United States that can boast that many of the same people who voted for John Quincy Adams also voted for George W. Bush twice; family is just that important to us here.

Defending the honor of his family was, in my opinion, the root cause of the events that marred the civil calm our citizens have grown accustomed to. At last Thursday’s meeting the developer, a thoroughly unlikable man with pretensions to obnoxiousness, if not outright swinishness, brought up the fact, as if we didn’t already know it, that he had bought the convent and wanted to start building his cookie cutter McMansions right away, and would the mayor therefore stop throwing legal obstacles in his way at every opportunity? The mayor denied right away that he was doing this, which, I must point out in a spirit of fairness, is codswallop piled on poppycock topped with balderdash. The mayor may have lost the vote over the land’s fate, but he’s been strangling the project in so much red tape ever since that everyone knows he’s just waiting for the developer to give up and move on to other projects. Most people either know or can find out for themselves that the German Army shot the last extant aurochs on this planet during the invasion of Poland in 1939, no doubt finding the beasts a welcome change from a diet of sardines and bratwurst, and as a result the developer should not have to provide an environmental impact statement detailing his project’s impact on the aurochs’ native habitat.

The developer, who along with being disagreeable in the extreme, is also a fairly excitable guy, lost his temper at this bald-faced departure from the facts as everyone knows them and began shouting at the mayor, liberally peppering his threats of legal action with a stream of invective that veered wildly from the merely libelous to the scatological, the profane, the blasphemous, and the obscene, sometimes combining all four at once. The mayor took the abuse with the stoic aplomb that more than one opponent has commented on, and then the developer brought up the mayor’s wife. Doing this is always a mistake. The mayor’s wife is a very nice woman these days and it does no one any good to bring up events from thirty years ago that really weren’t anyone’s fault; it’s not like anyone involved died as a result, except the goldfish; but the mayor is understandably touchy about the subject and those of us who live here understand his feelings and never bring the matter up amongst ourselves except when we are really bored and have nothing else to do. Having some smarmy loudmouth developer from out of town bring the subject up, and in a public forum, no less, was just too much for the mayor to bear, and he went sailing over the table and into low earth orbit to defend his wife’s honor, such as it is, in what was probably not the most graceful leap in the long annals of local politics.

Having gone up, the mayor then came down, and many witnesses told the reporters the next day that it was a good thing the mayor landed on the nuns sitting in the first row or he might have really hurt himself; the sisters are doing well, except for Sister Mary Margaret, who bore the full impact of the mayor’s nearly three hundred pound carcass landing on her lap. She is still in intensive care, but on the whole she held up much better than you would expect an eighty-five year old woman would to such an impact. The mayor pushed the developer up against the wall and then grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and tried to bash the real estate reprobate over the head with the thing. At this point, some members of the local gendarmerie came rushing into the City Council chamber in the not so nick of time and pulled the two men apart, arresting the mayor for assault and battery. They may have arrested the developer as well; I haven’t heard of any charges against him, though; being a first rate jerk is not yet a crime here in the Vampire State—if it were the state would as empty as Montana.

And that is all there is to the matter. I find having to recount such vile tales disagreeable in the extreme, for if those who lead us think so little of themselves and their obligations to the people who voted them into office, what hope is there for the ordinary citizen who only wants to lead a simple life free from civil strife? But in a democracy, the public must have the unvarnished truth, so that it can make wise decisions about the issues of the day and the people they send to the halls of power to represent them. If this screed helps the ongoing American experiment in democracy advance in any way, I will be satisfied. And no, I am not going to tell you about the damn goldfish.