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.

Short note to a vendor.

 

When June shows up, sunshine is sure to follow.

[from an email from one of our vendors. My response follows, and yes, I know the person that I sent this to.]

Sunshine? Is that June's new boyfriend? I thought his name was Roger or Raymond or something else that starts with an R. Rudolph comes to mind as well, but that may just be because there are now only six shopping months till Christmas. Be that as it may, I hope he's better than the last one she had. I'm sure that sumo is interesting in a weirdly grotesque sort of way; after all, the Japanese love it and one hundred million Japanese can't all be wrong, except about that whole karaoke thing, karaoke being, as far as I am concerned, one of the many very good reasons for why Japan deserved to lose the war; but the idea that someone as short as June would consider a relationship with a man who is taller than she is while lying on his back boggles the imagination in ways that no well-brought up imagination should ever be boggled.  In any case, I trust that all is well with you out there in the middle of the country. Here in the Northeast, we are all melting in the heat and humidity like the Wicked Witch of the West being sprayed with a fire hose during a five-alarm fire.

 

Sincerely,

 

AB

 

And?

I do not know why so many conservatives were surprised by what happened.  A rigged trial produced a rigged result. Isn't that the point of rigging the trial in the first place?

East Coast Earthquake

 

The thing is, I did not feel the earthquake that has so discombobulated the East Coast this morning, Really. I did not feel the thing at all. I was sitting in my comfortable chair at work minding my own business and the earth moved and I did not realize that the earth had moved. Having missed the earth moving, I simply went on with my bureaucratic life as if nothing had happened because for me, nothing had. Well, better luck next time, I suppose. And that was that, or at least that was what I thought. 

Apparently, not feeling the earth move during an earthquake is a sign of diminished mental capacity. People kept coming into the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and demanding to know how I coped with the great East Coast earthquake of 2024 and were deeply shocked that I coped with the massive catastrophe by not realizing it was happening at the time. Now, I would understand this lack of insight on my part if the quake was an event on the order of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or the Tokyo earthquake of 1923—it would take several deep hits off of a very large bong with incredibly strong weed to ignore disasters as large as those—but it wasn’t; from what I understand the quake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, which several people from California have assured me is the planetary version of mild heartburn and not something to be worried about at all. Trees shook, plates rattled, pets were perturbed, and that was about it. The East Coast has hurricanes that do all of that and more, and in the winter we have nor’easters that leave you and yours up to your backsides in freezing cold mucky water, an altogether unpleasant experience. I am still pumping water out of my cellar from our last meteorological misadventure.

My guess is that it was the novelty of this intense non-disaster that has impressed itself on everyone’s mind. We don’t get a lot of earthquakes here in the Vampire State; the last one that I remember hereabouts was when the Attorney General managed to push the Governor out of office on sexual harassment charges, which people tell me is not the same thing at all, although I am certain that it was the same thing to the Governor. He was planning to run for re-election for the umpteenth time, but as Mr. Burns says, the best-laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley. For years I had no clue what an agley was; I thought an agley was some sort of French cookie before an out of breath Scottish tourist stumbled into this place looking for a men's room and told me what it meant in the post-micturation interview where I told him how to get to the train station.

Be that as it may, many of the patrons of this mycological sinkhole regarded my insensitivity to the travails of Mother Earth as somewhat odd, given their own traumatic experiences, but I must say that insensitivity to what is going on around me is something people have been accusing me of for more years than I care to remember. The accusers are usually women, for some reason or another, teachers and librarians and other strange females that I became involved with in bars who decided that they did not like me anymore. I was never sure what the problem was, but it was usually something about not paying attention to their feelings. I thought I was paying attention, but my perception was clearly off as I am an insensitive lout. I know that because people, and by people I mean women, keep telling me that I am and who am I to argue with such a widespread and deeply held opinion? I do wish, however, that my mother would stop agreeing with them. It's an uncomfortable feeling when a boy can't be sure that his mom has his back.

 

Disbelieving the obvious

 

I don't remember why I was watching Oprah that day; it was in the 1990's, I think, and I must have been bored out of my mind, because that's the only way I could be induced to watch her program at all. But I am still glad I did. The guest that day was the writer and poet Maya Angelou and they were having a discussion about relationships and in the course of that conversation Ms Angelou said something that I have never forgotten because it has applications in so many other fields. They were discussing why women kept returning to toxic relationships with unsuitable men and Ms Angelou said that she didn't understand it, that when someone tells you who they are, believe them. The first time. If a man tells you that he is selfish, or his actions show you that he is selfish, then believe him: he is selfish. And then, as soon as you can, get out of the relationship because nothing good can come of it. He is not going to change.

Her admonition works on so many levels that I don't understand why it isn't taught in every political science class in the country. The French aristocracy couldn't believe that the Jacobins meant to guillotine them all; Northerners could not believe that the slave-holding South would tear the United States apart in order to keep their peculiar institution; Austria-Hungary could not believe that Serbia would fight it out rather than turn their country into an Austrian protectorate; no one, except Winston Churchill, apparently, believed that Adolf Hitler actually meant the crazy stuff he wrote in Mein Kampf. No one in Washington could believe that the Japanese would launch a surprise attack on the United States Navy, despite the fact that a surprise attack on the Imperial Russian Navy is exactly how the Japanese launched the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.  And now there are the charters of Hamas and Fatah, and the decades of terrorism since the founding of Israel. So what is an Israeli to believe? Does he believe the peace crowd that concessions on settlements or the right of return or some other point will finally at long last bring lasting peace, or does he believe what the Palestinians themselves say, which is that Israel is to be destroyed and the Jews there massacred? When a man tells you that he means to kill you and destroy your country, believe him. He knows what he wants far better than you ever will.

Bemoaning my fate......again

You know, I am starting to wonder when the crazy ever stops around this place. I don't know when I became an ATM for panhandlers or when I became the go to person to explain the philosophical niceties of Peanuts or why Jesus chose to walk on the water instead of taking the train. I have never seen The Wire and so I cannot discuss the plotting of season two and no, for the umpteenth time, you cannot use my phone to call your girl friend's brother to find out what she's wearing to her cousin's birthday party. You can use my phone only when you have an emergency, which I define as you pumping blood out of an artery all over the new carpeting. The weekend is only a half hour or so away and time is slowing down so that I may fully enjoy every single second of stupid that the general public can generate before I can get out of this dump.