[Note: The following was inspired by a conversation Mary and I had about Palm Sunday. Please don't ask me to trace the course of this chat back through the many hairpins, doglegs, and cul-de-sacs to its point of origin, because I have learned over the past twenty years that that way lies madness. Thank you.]
So I've always figured that if you go into politics, you may not get what you deserve, but you deserve what you get, whether you're a Roman Senator or a hustling ward-heeler. But I do feel a modicum of sympathy for bureaucrats. Sure, they can also be social climbing careerists who get promoted above the maximum ceiling of their competence through seniority, patronage, or graft, but you could say the same thing about the private sector, and unlike your average Banker Bro, the world financial system is not likely to be crashed by the guy who runs the Motor Vehicle Department in American Samoa. (I tried to find out who that person actually was, but while there was a link to the MVD, the American Samoan government apparently didn't pay their Go Daddy bill, because it just opens a page that says "This Account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information." But hey, I've had my utilities turned off a time or two, so rest assured that I'm not pointing fingers, American Samoa. I just don't think you should necessarily be in charge of the World Bank.)
Anyway, my point is that I empathize with the plight of Joe Bureaucrat, who has to do the unglamorous work of making a system designed by egomaniacs and idiots actually function on a day to day basis. Which brings me to Pontius Pilate.
Pilate was basically the First Century AD version of Michael Brown, the head of FEMA during George W. Bush's administration. Like Brown, whose previous experience was running the International Arabian Horse Association, Pilate was a member of the equestrian class, had powerful connections, and went largely unnoticed until a crisis hit and his professional shortcomings were suddenly exposed. (I have to give Pilate the advantage here, however, since Hurricane Katrina claimed over 1800 lives, while Jesus' plastic hassle with the Sanhedrin claimed only one. True, Brown didn't kill God, as a lot of Christians believed Pilate did, but in Pilate's defense, a lot of those Christians have historically preferred to blame the Jews anyway; and besides, that one death didn't even stick.)
So let's put ourselves in Pilate's place. He doesn't care about Jews squabbling over the finer points of their weird religion (it's only got one god, so what's there to fight about? It can't even provide decent dorm room bull session fodder, like "Who would win in a fight, Jupiter or Mars?"). He doesn't think Jesus is a criminal, let alone that he deserves the death penalty. But it's Passover, everybody's touchy, and the last thing Pilate needs is an uprising on his watch. So he pulls out his old Monopoly game and basically stacks the deck so that Christ will pull the Get Out of Jail Free Card.
[Note: for the purposes of this playlet, Pilate will be played by Claude Rains.]
PILATE: Happy Passover! I hope everyone is enjoying their big crackers and salty parsley, or whatever. As you know, it's our custom every year at this time to release one prisoner, chosen by you, the audience, and judged by this complicated brass applause meter from Antikythera. Now...
[PILATE gently steers JESUS forward]
PILATE: You can either have this small town rabbi who's got a great healthcare plan for the lepers, but with whom one or two of you might have the teensiest bit of doctrinal differences, or...
[Disdainfully nudges forward a filthy, glowering brute with the toe of his sandal]
PILATE: You can have this MURDERER...!
CROWD: We'll take the murderer!
PILATE: What! Why?
CROWD: We like the cut of his jib!
[Pilate gives the crowd some patented Claude Rains side-eye]
PILATE: Jib? What jib? We're in the desert.
CROWD: We were misinformed!
Tough day at the office, right? And this is how I imagine things going for Reince Priebus ever since Donald Trump got into the race. Reince doesn't want to involve himself in the hairsplitting arguments between the candidates, let alone appear to arbitrate them, but he'd clearly prefer the mob come to a certain conclusion.
[Note: for the purposes of this playlet, Priebus will be played by Arnold Stang.]
PRIEBUS: Heyyyyy, Republican voters! Hope everyone's having a good primary season. Say, just a quick show of hands, no pressure, but would you fine folks prefer a tested conservative with executive experience...?
(REINCE jerks his head toward Jeb Bush and Scott Walker so hard he appears to be suffering from St. Vitus Dance)
PRIEBUS: Or a man whose spray tan is the color of an Orange Julius after a bum peed in it?
GOP PRIMARY VOTERS: We'll take the urine-infused beverage from a food court!
[REINCE hangs his head, goes off to check the trades to see if anyone is thinking of rebooting Top Cat.]
I know, times are hard, and frankly, I could use a job, but I don't think I could take this one. At least not with a straight face.
Showing posts with label Straight Outta Compos Mentis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Straight Outta Compos Mentis. Show all posts
Monday, March 21, 2016
Thursday, October 15, 2015
2nd Amendment For 2nd Class Citizens!
As a fan of Joel Hodgson from Mystery Science Theater 3000, I obviously have no problems with a sleepy-eyed protagonist, but even I have to wonder if Ben Carson's evident narcolepsy might not disqualify him from the presidency. (Why worry about that "3 AM phone call" if the leader of the Free World is just as likely to be snoozing face-down in his morning bowl of Maypo?)
But then I read about how, as a young resident at Johns Hopkins, he foiled the armed robbery of a Popeyes Chicken franchise, just like Clint Eastwood did in the 1983 Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact. The two events are so eerily similar, in fact, that I suspect Carson's heroics may have inspired the scene in the movie, although they obviously spiced it up a bit for the screen (in the picture, Clint blows away most of the criminals, then challenges the last one to, "Go ahead...Make my day," while Carson helpfully pointed out the cashier to the gunman, then breezed out, whistling perhaps, or munching on a biscuit [had to be one or the other, since I know from personal experience that you can't do both simultaneously; especially not at the dinner table when your dad's sitting within back-of-the-head-smacking distance].)
Ben wasn't bragging, by the way; he only pulled out this artifact of badassery to prove he wasn't blaming the victims of the Umpqua shooting when he panned their response by saying, "Not only would I probably not cooperate with [the killer], I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him.'" Then, based on past performance, Ben would gesture at his fellow victims and advise the killer, "Shoot them! THEM!", and then probably go out to Popeyes for a Butterfly Shrimp Tackle Box™ ("8 butterfly shrimp, fries, biscuit & cocktail sauce". Granted, that may seem like a lot for one person, but take it from Ben, cheating Death works up an appetite; plus, as the sole survivor he's now eating for eight.)
Why tackle a gunman when you can Tackle The Shrimp!
Dr. Carson found himself on slightly less firm footing when he suggested that victims of the Holocaust could have nipped that whole thing in the bud by packing heat, but couldn't back it up by recollecting that one time in Baltimore when Nazis tried to ship him off to Treblinka, but he distracted them by pointing out the nearest Jew.
A lot of people suggested that outnumbered amateurs with hunting rifles wouldn't be likely to fare well against stormtroopers (the Nazi kind, not the Star Wars kind, because those guys can't shoot for crap), and since European Jews (and others marked as sub-human by the Third Reich) didn't know they were being removed to death camps (they were being "resettled"), they had little incentive to stage suicidal, Ruby Ridge-style last stands on their doorsteps. And of course, when armed resistance was eventually offered -- in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising -- it was rather quickly put down by an enemy equipped with artillery, mortars, machine guns, and all the other military-grade arms that -- even today -- only a select few of our bat-shittiest sovereign citizens have managed to stockpile.
Nevertheless, Dr. Carson remains committed to his Second Amendment As a Cure for the Common Shoah theory, and if anything, he seems inclined to double down on it. So rather than arguing with him, I'd just like to ask a follow-up question. Or rather, I'd like some journalist to ask it for me, since I'll never be in the same room with the guy.
1. Should Japanese-Americans have refused to surrender their guns to U.S. authorities in World War II? Please note, Dr. Carson, I'm not asking if the government had the right to confiscate their weapons, because as American citizens they were certainly entitled to the same Constitutional protections as their neighbors; my question is, should they have refused to give up their guns?
2. When the government forced Japanese-Americans to abandon their homes and property, should they have violently resisted relocation, as you say Europeans Jews were morally obliged to do? In other words, would they have been justified in shooting any Sheriff's Deputies or doughboys who showed up at their doors, ready to hustle them into a bus? After all, they knew they were being sent to concentration camps (what we'd call "FEMA Camps" today) so could they, and should they, have stopped this historic injustice by taking up arms and fighting their oppressors, just as you retroactively counseled the Jews to do?
And if not, why not?
But then I read about how, as a young resident at Johns Hopkins, he foiled the armed robbery of a Popeyes Chicken franchise, just like Clint Eastwood did in the 1983 Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact. The two events are so eerily similar, in fact, that I suspect Carson's heroics may have inspired the scene in the movie, although they obviously spiced it up a bit for the screen (in the picture, Clint blows away most of the criminals, then challenges the last one to, "Go ahead...Make my day," while Carson helpfully pointed out the cashier to the gunman, then breezed out, whistling perhaps, or munching on a biscuit [had to be one or the other, since I know from personal experience that you can't do both simultaneously; especially not at the dinner table when your dad's sitting within back-of-the-head-smacking distance].)
Ben wasn't bragging, by the way; he only pulled out this artifact of badassery to prove he wasn't blaming the victims of the Umpqua shooting when he panned their response by saying, "Not only would I probably not cooperate with [the killer], I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him.'" Then, based on past performance, Ben would gesture at his fellow victims and advise the killer, "Shoot them! THEM!", and then probably go out to Popeyes for a Butterfly Shrimp Tackle Box™ ("8 butterfly shrimp, fries, biscuit & cocktail sauce". Granted, that may seem like a lot for one person, but take it from Ben, cheating Death works up an appetite; plus, as the sole survivor he's now eating for eight.)
Dr. Carson found himself on slightly less firm footing when he suggested that victims of the Holocaust could have nipped that whole thing in the bud by packing heat, but couldn't back it up by recollecting that one time in Baltimore when Nazis tried to ship him off to Treblinka, but he distracted them by pointing out the nearest Jew.
A lot of people suggested that outnumbered amateurs with hunting rifles wouldn't be likely to fare well against stormtroopers (the Nazi kind, not the Star Wars kind, because those guys can't shoot for crap), and since European Jews (and others marked as sub-human by the Third Reich) didn't know they were being removed to death camps (they were being "resettled"), they had little incentive to stage suicidal, Ruby Ridge-style last stands on their doorsteps. And of course, when armed resistance was eventually offered -- in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising -- it was rather quickly put down by an enemy equipped with artillery, mortars, machine guns, and all the other military-grade arms that -- even today -- only a select few of our bat-shittiest sovereign citizens have managed to stockpile.
Nevertheless, Dr. Carson remains committed to his Second Amendment As a Cure for the Common Shoah theory, and if anything, he seems inclined to double down on it. So rather than arguing with him, I'd just like to ask a follow-up question. Or rather, I'd like some journalist to ask it for me, since I'll never be in the same room with the guy.
1. Should Japanese-Americans have refused to surrender their guns to U.S. authorities in World War II? Please note, Dr. Carson, I'm not asking if the government had the right to confiscate their weapons, because as American citizens they were certainly entitled to the same Constitutional protections as their neighbors; my question is, should they have refused to give up their guns?
2. When the government forced Japanese-Americans to abandon their homes and property, should they have violently resisted relocation, as you say Europeans Jews were morally obliged to do? In other words, would they have been justified in shooting any Sheriff's Deputies or doughboys who showed up at their doors, ready to hustle them into a bus? After all, they knew they were being sent to concentration camps (what we'd call "FEMA Camps" today) so could they, and should they, have stopped this historic injustice by taking up arms and fighting their oppressors, just as you retroactively counseled the Jews to do?
And if not, why not?
Monday, August 17, 2015
Me and Mr. Jones
By Keith
I'm grateful to Scott C. for allowing me to announce an exciting new feature exclusively for World O' Crappers. Dropping in early September.
From here, to there, to hospital and perhaps beyond, your correspondent will cover exquisitely-constructed and recursively-linked bat-shit and bait-click conspiracy theories promoted by the One and Only Alex Jones, native of Austin, TX.
If you've not previously encountered Mr. Jones, he has a website titled Infowars and a daily podcast you can sample here. But why bother when I'll do the grunt work? You and your loved ones shall never trouble yourselves in the least.
August is never the best time for a product debut, but just to give a teaser, behold the "Alex Jones Conspiracy Convolution Matrix." It's based on a Chinese restaurant menu technique used by 60's print pornographers (also the editors at Fox Cable News). Mix and match ... it's easy. Create your own scenarios ... we'll merge them into a user database on github.
I'm grateful to Scott C. for allowing me to announce an exciting new feature exclusively for World O' Crappers. Dropping in early September.
From here, to there, to hospital and perhaps beyond, your correspondent will cover exquisitely-constructed and recursively-linked bat-shit and bait-click conspiracy theories promoted by the One and Only Alex Jones, native of Austin, TX.
If you've not previously encountered Mr. Jones, he has a website titled Infowars and a daily podcast you can sample here. But why bother when I'll do the grunt work? You and your loved ones shall never trouble yourselves in the least.
August is never the best time for a product debut, but just to give a teaser, behold the "Alex Jones Conspiracy Convolution Matrix." It's based on a Chinese restaurant menu technique used by 60's print pornographers (also the editors at Fox Cable News). Mix and match ... it's easy. Create your own scenarios ... we'll merge them into a user database on github.
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