Friday, August 13, 2010

How much should you tip the hangman?

Steve,

While considering this year's crop of louts, buffoons, hustlers, frauds, and clodhoppers running for office this year, I was suddenly stuck by the most stunningly sick joke expressed by American politics, which is that people actually pay money to get this riff-raff elected.

It is as if the highest priced item on the menu at a restaurant was bits of garbage from the dumpster out back - or the most expensive show on Broadway was three hours of gibbering baboons. Or, after being mugged and violated, asking the mugger to wait while you go to the bank and get him some more money. Or how much, exactly, should a condemned man tip the hangman?

Steve, this is money you could be using to improve the world, or at least to buy a new circular saw.

How is this possible? After combing the back alleys, saloons, and off-track betting parlors, and dragging from them a preposterous collection of side-show freaks, how can they ask us with a straight face to pay money we have honestly earned to get these nitwits elected?

It makes no sense. It is black comedy on a scale so vast it warps the boundaries of reality. Of the money we "contribute", a good half of it magically disappears into the pockets of "political consultants" recruited from the ranks of unemployed carnival barkers. Most of the rest is then spent to fabricate and broadcast the most absurdly implausible lies they tell on one another. If anything is left, the balance is used for hush money to keep the candidate's embarrassing peccadillo's quiet.

Steve, its grand, side splitting humor that anyone not confined to a mental institution should actually spend the few minutes it takes to vote for one of these mountebanks - especially when this represents time one could be spending in more useful pursuits. Like clipping toenails for example. But to up the the ante of this farce by voluntarily paying for it transcends mere humor.

After they're elected, they will steal enough from us. Why can't we just leave it at that?

-Chris

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