A "Dear John" Boehner Letter

Dear John:   My demographic profile is so freakish it should simultaneously lift your heart, and worry you.  I am a naturalized citizen, an Asian-American, a union member, and a federal employee.  I should be allied with the Democrats.  But because I believe in moral standards (and therefore condemn abortion and homosexual marriage), and because I can count (and therefore abhor deficit spending), I am conservative, and therefore vote Republican.  If you lose me, you will have lost the firmest part of your base.  So listen.

     Don’t compromise our values; don’t cut deals with Obama; do not yield an inch of political ground.  If we lose, let us go down fighting, defeated but righteous.  If the left wins, America will continue its cultural and economic decline until it meets with impoverishment and impotence.  That is a fate worse than the grimmest Republican electoral loss, in any case.  If our party upholds its principles, and since those principles are grounded in truth, we may yet sway a few more folks to vote our way.  But if you play along with Obama, I shall say “sayonara” to you.

     I am prepared to see cuts in government services and benefits, the more draconian the better.  I prefer temporary economic disruption to certain economic collapse.  I will relish the media outcry over our collective plunge into the fiscal abyss.  Unlike your House, mine carries no debt.  I have gold and silver on the side, to trade for bread and water, if it comes to it.

     I have a dream—that the day will come when illegals no longer infest our land; when unborn babies are treated more kindly than stray animals; when the government limits itself to building roads, and leaves the promising of paradise to the clergy.

Helping Obama

In August, just 96,000 jobs were created, and since four times that number of people gave up looking for work, the jobless rate actually went down to 8.1%, which got me thinking.  Let us all pitch in, and help Pres. Obama get re-elected.  Let’s all quit our jobs, and take a long, long nap until November.  That way, the labor pool will dry up, causing the unemployment rate to plunge to zero.  Obama can beam with satisfaction as he observes the entire country revert to a medieval village.

     On the education front, here’s a suggestion.  Give the teachers’ unions everything they want—everything—so that homeowners’ taxes skyrocket from six to, say, sixty thousand dollars, even as the value of their homes diminishes.  The public sector’s arrow on the chart goes up, while the private sector’s arrow goes down.  We’ll call this the “Detroit Model of Wealth Redistribution.”  Now, in the middle of our medieval village, a tall ivory tower rises.  The educators inhabiting this tower do not actually have jobs either.  They don’t accomplish much, and besides, they’re “entitled” to live in the tower.  They would say they have a divine right to tenure, but of course there is no such thing as divinity.

     As for climate change—easy.  Schedule Barack Obama to appear in as many entertainment shows and talk programs as Air Force One can handle.  He is after all the “Teacher of Great Renown” sung about in Paul Simon’s song of 2000—the Teacher who “sucked all the moisture from the clouds.”  As the planet warms, Obama becomes progressively “cooler”—more hip and cosmopolitan than anyone alive.  His cooling influence counteracts rising temperatures everywhere, and equilibrium is achieved in the global village.

     Coming soon on November 6—“Messiah: The Sequel,” rated R for religious content.

A Post-Election Carol

O wretched town of Washington!

How frequently you lie

About the dumb things you have done,

And at what cost, and why.

 

Now sits in utter darkness

Obama’s U.S.A.

His “hope and change” have rearranged

This nation’s D.N.A.

 

The promises you rarely keep,

The deals you oft contrive

Make us feel creeped out as we weep—

Can anyone survive?

 

Barack Hussein Obama,

Although your House is White,

The dirt and shame of your campaign

Are met in thee tonight!

All Wet

All Wet

 

The ship, of which Barack Obama was the captain, struck what felt like an iceberg.  But at that latitude in the north Atlantic, icebergs had long since disappeared, hauled off to quench the thirst of Arabian and Kuwaiti populations.  In fact we had hit an oil platform, out of service, and drifting in the ocean, its crew long since conscripted into the green-energy industry.  Capt. Obama had just left the ballroom, where he had re-assigned the first-class cabins of the rich to the steerage passengers, who hailed him as their hero.

     Panicked, I leaped into a lifeboat with an Illinois state flag at its stern.  Big mistake.  Just as I lowered the boat into the water, some scoundrel emerged from under a tarp, yelling, “Oh no, ye don’t!”  The man threw a line back up to the sinking ship, where it snagged a bollard.  He turned to me, and said, “I’m guvner heah, and I’m goin’ wiv my capt’in!”

     I jumped into the ocean then, wearing a life vest labeled “Property of Du Page County.”  Curiously, and much to my consternation, this life vest had weights attached to it, marked “Rec Center Assessment,” and “utility surcharge.”  I looked up at the fool on the lifeboat.  “Heah!” he yelled, lifting an anvil.  “Ye may as well fund the teachers’ pensions too if yar gonna drown!”

     I squirmed out of my vest, and swam all night to a raft.  “Where am I?” I asked the men who were paddling the raft. 

     “You’re on what’s left of American conservatism,” one of them replied.  “If you’re staying, you’re going to have to paddle.”

     And so I did—but not before writing a letter, which I placed inside a plastic bottle.  Murmuring a prayer, I cast the bottle into the waves. 

     You’re reading that letter.    

"His and Hers"

“His and Hers”

                 a parable

                       I

His tastes ran toward the old—

Antiques; knickknacks sold

At an eccentric’s former estate;

Flea-market stuff few experts could date.

Chromolithographic prints

Inviting professorial squints;

Ivory and bronzes of late vintage

Formed his archeological assemblage.

                       II

She, glad in disposition,

Had in her possession

A cheery set of objects: so bright

As to assault one’s sense of sight.

Gewgaws (what she called a “variety”

Of Yuletide ornaments), all of gaudy

Manufacture, gave her heart a lift.

Such, between his view and hers, was the rift.

                       III

One day, out of caprice,

She gathered every piece

Of forlorn junk he owned, and with a smile

Threw the antiquarian pile

Into an industrial furnace,

Which hissed and roared in earnest,

Turning every trinket, tin, and medal

Into smoke and molten metal.

Learning of this holocaust,

He vowed revenge, whatever the cost,

Bulldozing into a pit her cutesy

(i.e., Hallmark, Hobby Lobby, Disney)

Crap, covering it over with dirt,

As though assuaging his hurt—

Her entire personal collection,

Like his, consigned to oblivion.

                       IV

Yet nature and posterity

Turn every calamity

To some use: his formless metal,

Years later, becomes the material

(A mix of new-fangled alloys)

Used to make cheap charms and toys.

Decades pass, and, excavated,

Her tchotchkes, now discolored, are traded

And celebrated as antiques

By the same old melancholic geeks.

Even in the most heart-rending

Twists of fate, there is hope; but the ending

Of this tale of his and hers

Can hardly be worse.

The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse

I came to this country a quarter of a century ago, when America was one of two superpowers.  Today, despite having won the Cold War, America nonetheless finds itself “buried”—to use Khrushchev’s word.  Buried in debt; buried in red tape.  Worst of all, America has buried its head in the sand.

     Back in the old country, politicians were shameless in their corruption.  American politics, though increasingly vile, still requires a veneer of hypocrisy, but, take it from me, we are degenerating into a banana republic.  I should know; I was born in the Philippines.

     There are four forces tearing this nation apart.  The first consists of the millions of illegal aliens subsisting parasitically on our welfare system.  Most of these illegals are fine, hard-working people; some are dangerous; many are mendicant.  All, having broken our immigration laws, are criminals.

     The second threat in our own backyard is radical Islam, that segment of the Muslim community which seeks to overthrow our democratic tradition, and replace it with Sharia law.  Islamists are a minority among their co-religionists, but they are vocal, determined, and growing.  They will not stop until their jihad is accomplished, or until they themselves are stopped.  But who is to stop them, when their unwitting allies—the third threat to our civilization—are the very secularists and liberals who control the levers of power in our institutions?  The American elite, in academia, Hollywood, Wall Street, and Washington, sympathize with our enemies.  In the eyes of the Left, indiscriminate diversity—not liberty—is the way to peace.

     And finally, this nation is literally going to the dogs.  Pet owners, like the rest of society, have gone soft.  Dogs and cats rule America’s homes.  In the old country, we fed them scraps, before we ourselves ate the dogs.

My $6,376 Question

 

Well, I’ve filed my federal and state tax returns.  I now file this report on what it’s like to be brow-beaten by Uncle Sam, who scowls more fiercely around this time of the year.  Last year I earned $12,000 less than I did in 2010, yet the tax table tells me I owe the IRS just $780 less than in the previous year.  The “making work pay” credit has been eliminated by our astute leaders, you see, and they’re right; working hard IS pointless.

     My $6,376 check to the government, dated April 1st, 2012, will retroactively pay for some long-forgotten Congressman’s ear-marked project approved in 1992.  The bill for nearly half of everything the federal government does TODAY will eventually go on my, and your, children’s tab.  The guy who, with his marginal savings, is currently paying for all of Obama’s green initiatives is the factory worker in China—the same worker making the solar panels which undercut Solyndra’s products.

     I feel my $6,376 check entitles me to ask a few questions about the government.  Why, when it cannot run the postal service competently, does the government think it can manage the health-care industry, which is one-sixth of our economy? 

     The goal of the Environmental Protection Agency, originally, was to keep us from having to breathe foul air.  Recently the agency designated our very exhalations (carbon dioxide) as a pollutant, which means we—far from breathing bad air—are now producing it.  The EPA has met the enemy, and he is us.

     But the government isn’t always overly ambitious.  For instance, since it cannot seal our southern border, or deal effectively with Iran, it resorts to campaigning against bullying, steroids in baseball, and the use of incandescent lamps.

     The government sure is big, and my own world so, so small.