The fires this time

 You know, I remember back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina almost moved the city of New Orleans into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, a reporter asked General Honore, the head of the Federal task force coordinating the response  to the catastrophe, a question about the shortcomings of the earlier state and local responses the general had been brought in to correct. General  Honore cut the reporter off, telling him to not get stuck on stupid.  There would be a time for such questions once the disaster was over, but the current moment was neither the time or the place; people needed rescuing, the levees had to be shored up, the city had to be saved.  First things first.

Twenty years later, the city of Los Angeles, California (is the state even necessary in this sentence? There is only one LA, and everyone knows where it is located) is not only stuck on stupid, the city and the state's leadership class is firmly and proudly stuck on stupid, stranded in the muck of its own progressive delusions and doing its best to remain stuck there while simultaneously getting the rest of the country to pay for the cleanup (unlikely) and avoiding responsibility for the fires in the first place (even more unlikely). But hope springs eternal, so there will be no change in the city's forest management program and the reservoirs will remain unfilled and the snail darter will remain protected.  Los Angeles firefighters will have to check the right demographic boxes in order to get a job in the first place and will have to spout the progressive movement's DEI bromides with tremendous enthusiasm in order to keep the job they have.  Insurance companies will not be allowed to make money for their own good and poorly insulated electric wires will remain above ground for reasons that surpasseth understanding. So the more the fires destroy, the more things will stay the same. And Los Angeles, the city and the county, and state of California will not lower taxes on the population in their time of affliction, which makes the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California look a lot less like modern governments and more like a poorly run protection racket operated by the Mafia's not so best and brightest.  All of them will probably be re-elected. 

DEATH AND SCHOOL TAXES: Well, it's time to pay the school taxes again and once again I find myself wondering just what in the hell my money's going for. I don't suppose I'd object to paying the taxes if they uneducable dolts who infest the school buildings my money provides them actually learned something, but as we all know, the modern American school is simply a place to warehouse the young during the daylight hours so they can conduct their social lives with a minimum of adult interference and the modern American curriculum little more than a warm bath of politically correct verities that no one is allowed to question lest someone ask why aren't the kids getting a real education? Hence, my trepidation at paying for such nonsense. I would not mind paying school taxes if I could choose what schools got the money: I have no objections to paying for parochial schools or for schools of fish or even for schools that trained performing seals. In all of these cases the students actually learn something worth knowing. Parochial school kids learn their 4R's: reading, riting, rithmetic, and religion, although I suppose for the Roman Catholic kids religion and riting go together [yes, I am punning there, so kind of you to notice], as well as how to avoid mean nuns sucker punching you in a lunch line [yes, that hurts, especially when the nun in question wraps her rosary beads around her fist] school fish learn not to bunch together so closely, lest a whale whack them over their collective heads for lunch, and performing seals learn useful skills like balancing a beachball on their noses, which is a skill no one will pay an illegal alien for and guarantees the seal's long term job prospects in an uncertain economy.

THE RAGE OF THE LEFTIES: The hard left is not happy with the former junior senator from Illinois, and I suspect the former junior senator from Illinois is not happy with himself, but I suspect that both of them will get over it by 2012. Not so, say some of the left, we will primary the turncoat for his departure from the purest of pure dogma; I suspect if they could burn him at the stake for his heresy, they would, but that will not happen, of course, if for no other reason that the Secret Service would have something to say about casting the former junior senator from Illinois in the role of Giordano Bruno. I also strongly suspect that the hard left that lashes the One so hard now will fall into line by 2012 and that there will be no serious primary challenger.

How and why do I say this? Simple: who else are they going to support? Hilary? Hilary is part and parcel of the former junior senator’s administration; she can’t denounce him without opening herself up to questions about what she was doing in his administration. And where would this putative challenger gain his (or her) support? What parts of the Democratic base would be willing to challenge a sitting president of their own party? The labor unions? True, there has been little progress on card check, but the intervention that kept General Motors and Chrysler alive and out of bankruptcy also saved the UAW’s overpriced contracts with those companies and prevented the dominoes of disaster from racing through the industries that supply the big auto companies, something that I am sure the former junior senator’s minions will point out forcefully to any labor leader who wants to support a primary challenger. The expansion of the federal government continues apace, so the government unions will probably not vote against someone with a proven track record of bloating the government, and I think this may include the teachers’ unions as well, although they could go either way, depending on the circumstances. The blacks? Are you kidding? Any primary challenger who thinks that he’ll get the black vote away from the former junior senator from Illinois is deluding themselves in much the same way that the leaders of Europe’s socialist movement deluded themselves when the crisis came in August of 1914. Tribe trumps ideology; that is reality. The blacks will vote for their man and if our putative primary challenger did manage to unseat the One, then the blacks will sit the 2012 election out in protest; it may even give more than one black voter a reason to rethink his absolute commitment to the Democratic Party, which is always a good thing. And the rest of the limousine liberals on the East and West Coasts, the dwellers in the academic cloud-cuckoo-land, and the media and the chattering classes? There aren’t enough of these people to threaten the One, so in the end the hard left will swallow their ideological rage and tow the line.

The big question, I think, is whether the former junior senator from Illinois can swallow his rage. This is a unique situation for him, I think. He’s never been in a situation where he’s had to treat the Republicans seriously. Up to now, from his early days in politics to the White House, the GOP has been a curious abstraction to him, the way that any alternative lifestyle is an abstraction to those who don’t follow it. He comes from a safely Democratic state, a state where the Republicans know that they are in the minority and thus have to spend much time treating with the majority to get what scraps they can get. Whether he realized it before or not, Chicago-style politics only works in a one party state where there is no one to check the knife wielders. Come January 1st, that will not be possible. John Boehner does not need the One’s good will to flourish politically; the people of Ohio sent the future Speaker back to Washington to thwart the One and all his doings. Watching the former junior senator’s attempts to get what he wants from a now hostile House of Representatives should be very interesting and make for very interesting television. I’m still waiting for Olbermann’s head to make like Vesuvius, though; that promises to be entertaining.

OLD GLORY AND THE DISCONTENTED: Now let me see if I’ve got this straight: in the state of California, a state that is slowly (and then suddenly, like Mike in The Sun Also Rises) going bankrupt, school officials have nothing better to do with their time than to tell a kid that he can’t fly an American flag on his bicycle because such flagwaving, an old and endearing American habit, by the way, would cause racial tensions with the Mexican inmates of this politically correct institution. That the child of American citizens, himself an American citizen when he is not busy being an annoying kid, cannot fly an American flag as he rides his American bike (all right, it’s probably Chinese) on American streets on his way to an American school run by (probably) American bureaucrats whose salaries are paid for by American taxpayers because such a display might annoy Mexicans is more than a little outrageous. If the Mexican contingent in the school does not like this display of American pride, I would suggest to them that there are Mexican schools in Mexico where one may fly the Mexican flag to one’s heart’s content and that you can do so for years without ever seeing the American flag and the sooner you take this opportunity to return from whence you came, the sooner you will not have to put up with annoying gringo kids flying their annoying gringo flag from their not-gringo bike.

Hat tip to Snoopy over at Simply Jews: I literally hadn't heard about this before.

DAZE OF HEAVEN...NOT REALLY: And so it’s Friday the thirteenth, a day wherein I usually feel as if I should have stayed home in bed, largely because today is one of those days, like, April 15th, when I know that the cosmic powers that be are out to make my life miserable. Birthdays are sometimes like that as well, but a miserable birthday applies only to the supposed celebrant—the rest of us can go on as happy as clams, which is the sort of thing you do when you are caught up in the bivalve lifestyle—whereas Friday the 13th and April 15th are all purpose let’s screw them over days that apply to the populace as a whole. Even Groundhog Day can’t equal the annoyance value of the other two dates; if you live in North Dakota, you know you’re in for six more weeks of snow, ice, sleet, and freezing your ass off whether that stupid rodent saw its shadow or not, and if you live in Miami, then you couldn’t care less one way or the other if the oversized rat saw his shadow: you’re basking in the sunshine one way or the other. The good thing about Friday the 13th and April 15th, of course, is that these are the two dates every year where you are not paranoid. The rest of the year people will think you have some sort of weird persecution complex if you spend your time worrying about what was going to go wrong today, but on those two dates, you and me and everyone else knows that your troubles are not psychological: they really are out to get you.

In any case (and yes, this is a whiplash of a segue, no two ways about it), I am relieved to hear that the State of Connecticut has decided not to take over the Roman Catholic Church. The state legislature was considering a bill that give financial control of Catholic parishes to the parishioners, leaving the bishops and priests with only an advisory role in how the church’s money was spent. The proposal died a swift and painless death after thousands upon thousands of Catholic voters let their elected representatives know that they would not remain their elected representatives if they passed the bill. Faced with the possibility of standing in the snow at an electoral Canossa, the state legislature did what any group of high-minded statesmen intent on serving the commonweal would do in such a situation: they caved in. In fact, the Connecticut state legislature caved in so quickly and so well that they’re thinking of doing an instructional video to show out of state legislators the up to date way to cave in. I’m glad they did cave, although I must admit that the idea of a state takeover of the Church intrigues me. Would such a takeover mean that if the Connecticut state troopers catch me speeding on I-84, and they will someday, I could forego paying the fine and getting the points on my license and just say three Our Fathers and a Hail Mary instead?

BEER AND FRANKENSTEIN'S RICE: Now you have to understand that this news means very little to me personally; beer might as well be Midol for all the use I make of the stuff; but I now that there are those among you who take an interest in such things so I figured you might want to know this. It appears that a well-known American brewing company, which shall remain nameless here because they haven’t paid for the advertising space, has started using genetically modified rice in the production of the insipid fluid this company palms off as lager beer on the complete unsuspecting American beer swilling public. When this news broke a few days ago, consternation swept the length and breadth of this our Great Republic and the hitherto inchoate voice of Joe Sixpack resounded clearly from sea to shining sea with the demand that this brewer cease and desist this loathsome practice immediately.

To emphasize their disgust, massed contingents of beer drinkers from New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago are even now descending on St. Louis by bus in order to picket the corporate headquarters of this zymurgical malefactor; contingents from Boston, Phoenix, and Cleveland will join the protest one by one as the baseball postseason progresses. Unlike the first three cities, beer drinkers in the latter three cities still have to perform, one that demands their complete attention for the next couple of weeks. But although they must wait to join the protest, these beer drinkers support the cause overwhelmingly. Few things in recent American history have so united the beer-drinking world as much as this, joining friends and enemies alike in a common bond. Clearly, if the North and the South can heal the division that tore them apart, if black and white can try to bridge the racial divide that has afflicted this nation for centuries, then the denizens of Yankee Land and the inhabitants of the Red Sox Nation can work together in peace and amity to further a magnificent cause, at least until Opening Day next year when we can drop the pretense and go back to hating those miserable little bastards with every fiber of our being.

And, naturally enough, in chaos there is opportunity. German and Belgian brewers are trying to cash in on this sudden revulsion with commercials highlighting the all-natural qualities of their beers and the really large breasts of the models they use to advertise it. I am sure all straight guys appreciate the sight of faux German beer garden blondes in incredibly low cut blouses on their television screens, especially the guys with high definition television, a wonderful device that opens vast new possibilities for the word jiggle, this constant harping on the all-natural quality of their beers is apt to be something of a turn-off for American men. For your average American, all-natural means something that your wife or mother wants you to consume because it is good for you or will help save the whales, who have never, if you don’t mind me saying so, done one goddam thing to save humanity ever. Did you ever hear of a whale offering to negotiate between rival sects of loony religious fanatics out to cut each other’s throats with a dull butter knife? I didn’t think so. All-natural means health food and for Joe Sixpack health food is something that unhealthy looking gray-haired hippies who haven’t figured out that the Sixties are gone for good eat while they go on and on about how this food is pure in its essence and won’t do anything to screw your karma up, unlike all the violence you’re stuffing into your face when you chow down on the hamburger that you really want for dinner.

And if this is the reaction corporate America can expect from ordinary beer-drinking people, the reaction of America’s youth to the possibilities of genetic modification will be positively cataclysmic, no doubt shaking Wall Street to its very foundations. What American child will ever eat a sugary breakfast cereal again after they discover that their usual breakfast candy is, in fact, genetically modified spinach, and that their dark and creamy chocolate milk is nothing more than asparagus run through the gene splicer a few times. Yes, indeed, the howls of fury from the hordes of deceived little brats over eating stuff that’s good for them will be loud and long, and heard from Wall Street to the very gates of hell itself.

I bring up the children—excuse me while I bite my lip in obligatory obeisance to the snarling little rats and their needs—because I paid my school taxes the other day. Paying your school taxes on a school day is almost always a mistake. The put upon taxpayer in such a situation cannot help but notice the discrepancy between what they are paying and the product that flows like so much proboscidean effluence in February out of the schoolhouse door and down the street at a quarter to three five days a week. I just shelled out three thousand dollars for the education of the children of our happy little burg, and I think I can say, without too much fear of contradiction, that I can flush my money down a rat hole better than the board of education can. I would probably enjoy it more, too—I wouldn’t mind buying myself a really expensive camera with that wad of cash—but this, I fear, is not to be. No, I have given them the money, making it possible for the board of education and their minions in the teachers’ union to better inculcate the slimy tenets of political correctness into their charges and pass off such indoctrination as education. I do not worry about this as much as some people seem to do, given that the broad mass of young people in the schools here in our happy little burg are no more educable than a quart of milk is, and therefore the constant pedagogical cramming of political correctness in all its nefarious forms into their thick skulls makes no more dent in their bovine consciousnesses than learning an actual subject would. It’s just that I would rather keep the money myself.

Still, you must feel some small iota of pity for these scholastic hostages. The only real way to guarantee that all children who want an education receive one is to institute a voucher system and then follow that up with the permanent end of compulsory education in this country. This will end the monopoly of the teachers’ unions and guarantee that the kids in the classrooms actually want to learn something. As for the hordes of young hooligans who will take to this opportunity to bail out of the education system forever, the state can sell nine to three hunting licenses for $2,000 apiece and a strictly enforced you shoot it, you eat it policy. This will help thin the herd of feral youths on the street looking for trouble at any given time and help finance the education of the children who remain in school. I have proposed this solution at a good many board of education meetings, but it has never really gone anywhere; I didn’t think it ever would, to be honest with you, bureaucratic intransigence to new ideas being what it is these days.