Breakfast of Champions, Party of Cripples

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Party of Grant an' Hoover (& Fratboy, & Hudak, & Bielat, & ...) has, laboriously an' postgallantly an' neohonourably, elected zero (0.0) percent of the Massachusetts delegation to the Fedguv House of Representatives.

Now had EYE been engaged to agitprop for the Funders of Fratboy, LLC, as Party Neocomrade Ch. X. Cassidy of the _LDH Herald_ has, it appears, been, I trust that I would keep that number in mind a little as I scribbled. For there is some danger under such circumstances of makin' oneself an' one's Venerable Funders look silly.

For example, one might start by whimperin' that America's Otherparty is sadly underrepresented around here just at present. To work up some alligator tears and crocodile sympathy from us donkeys, notoriously bleeding of heart as we are, with a self-sorrowin' _shtyk_ seems to me quite feasible, though admittedly not likely to result in any concrete affirmative action on behalf of the political cripples. However, if the crips insist simultaneously on pretendin' to be comic-book superheroines able to go around (quote) SLAMMIN' (endquote) whatever gets in the path of the Big Party an' Her AEIdeology, well, the sentimental mood is swiftly ruined, the sympathy of us strangers, always precarious, forfeited almost before it was properly garnerished in the first place.

Furthermore, Lady Logic advises me that the Party of Cripples will not be -- CAN not be -- worse off than they are at present, no matter what cruel vivisection may befall all those dogs and ponies held behind closed doors in the dungeons an' labòratories of Bacon Hill. True, Fratboy Himself will perhaps fall at the hands of St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy--¡Father Zeus hasten the glad event!--but that has nothing to do with redistricting.

Operative Cassidy does the Party of Crips no great favor by unearthin' an' drawin' attention to certain notions of what True Fairembalancement (® & ™ & ©) requires current in cripple circles. Even if the Illustriously Freemighty Lord (_jasnie wolnomozhny Pan_) of Bielat were an academic or Party TankThinker with no personal ax to grind, _ad hoc_ery like CD lines "drawn to make sure you have an equal voice for people with similar problems" would only be yet another part of why we laugh from them. It would indeed be great fun to see a map of the Hill City Commonwealth drawn up on those lines, yellow, say, for all those precincts of MA where the prevailing local problem is the Heartbreak of Psoriasis, but dark blue where underwater real estate, or perhaps the unsatisfactory techniques of Native Management now employed down at Washin’ton City, take precedence. However it is clear that there is no such map and never will be, that what the nifty neoproposal is really about is not having His Freemightiness (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) as one’s Fedguv Rep., a ‘problem’ that ‘similarly’ afflicts everybooby from Provincetown to the Berkshires.

And of course if one gives the crips an inch, they'll soon be yammerin’ for an ell. Most donkeys have figured out by now, one hopes, that it is safest to assume that what the Party neocomrades really understand by fairembalancement would be, more or less, a dictatorship of the Worcester County Chambermaids of Commerce: "An EMPLOYER and an employee are clean different things" -- that's the ticket, Dr. Bones!

"Really understand by" here refers not so much to what goes on consciously in the dittopans of individual Republicanines, but to the effective principles of their self-behavior, those rules of thumb that most accurately predict what the kiddies will be gettin’ funded to yammer for next. In making such predictions the sudent of neocomradological science must bear in mind that the Mass. Party of Cripples is significantly different from the correspondin’ Homeland™-wide crew. Roughly speaking, the latter stand to the former as the CCUSA of Massa Tom Donahue to the freedamsels of Worcester an’ Essex, far less parochial an' provincial, far readier for prime time. Yet not essentially different. Not less zealously devoted to the EMPLOYER Ascendancy, only scabbin' for a more sophisticated representative of The Class.

Happy days.
--JHM