Main Street Beat

My friend, the old curmudgeon, was at Staples buying printer ink when I ran into him late yesterday morning.

He was giving the sales clerk what for about the price. “Shades of [expletive] King Gillette”, he fulminated, “sell you the razor at cost, then bleed you to death for the blades.”

Quickly surmising that if he had a printer, he must have acquired a computer, I commented on his belated embrace of 20th Century technology. Brushing off my attempt at chummy sarcasm, he cocked his good eye at me, and declared, “Sonny, you don’t know the [expletive] half of it.”

As we inched forward in the checkout line, he enlightened me.

It seems that the sudden touch of wintery chill that had descended on the Cape had forced him indoors, abandoning his usual spot on the bench across from the statue of Iyannough on Main Street. That’s where he regularly holds forth, grousing about the sorry state of things to anyone unwary enough to pause for a chat.

He’d recently read about the Internet in a 1985 issue of Popular Science pulled from the dusty stack he keeps in a corner behind his tropical fish tank. Straightaway, he’d decided it was right up his alley.

“I’m starting a blog”,  he confided, looking furtively around lest anyone else become prematurely privy to this bombshell revelation. “I was going to call it Common Sense, but I was afraid people might confuse it with the book, so I decided to call it HorSense, whaddaya think?”

Without waiting for an answer, he went on to describe how his blog would enrich the social dialog. When I inquired as to how he planned to handle inappropriate comments, he replied that he would allow gratuitous insults, ad hominems, scatological references, and comparisons to Hitler/Nazis, but only when they were employed in support of his own viewpoint.

“When the blog goes viral, I reckon It’ll draw a bigger crowd than I get on a good day during tourist season between my park bench spot and my barstool at the 19th Hole combined”

By this time, we were out in the parking lot, where we parted ways. I exited and headed for Tommy Doyle’s Pub where I could contemplate this unsettling cultural development over my customary midday pint, wondering whether I should have asked him for his URL.

Liberalese Endangered

Missing in all the hoo-ha attending Twitter’s NYSE coming-out ceremony last week, was any recognition that its trading debut edged liberal political dialog one notch closer to extinction.

We Liberals are fundamentally incapable of posing simple questions, giving simple answers, or responding to any conversational gambit –- written or verbal -- in as few as 140 words, much less 140 characters. It’s just not our nature. We don’t deal in crisp slogans, catchy sound-bites, or twitterverse exchanges. When -- for example -- did you last see an arresting Liberal bumper sticker?

Liberals are conditioned from birth to spend their unexciting lives engaged in long, boring, richly nuanced exposition, propounded with rigor and exactitude. Excepted from this rule are arch comebacks, as when Judge Julius Hoffman at the Chicago 7 trial admonished Liberal manqué Norman Mailer to “stick with the facts”, and Mailer replied, “Facts are nothing without their nuance, sir.”

As Ray Penning wrote in COMMENT, “political practice is reductionist by nature,” which fact leaves Liberals at a distinct disadvantage. Conservatives bury us at sloganeering. Only one historical Democratic presidential campaign slogan makes it onto my personal Hit Parade, FDR’s Happy Days Are Here Again (and he had to poach it from Tin Pan Alley); all the rest are Republican or Whig.

Liberals and Progressives had better get cracking and start raising a generation of verbal-shorthand virtuosos or our ideas are going to be left in the dustbin of history (no mean phrasemaker, Comrade Trotsky), as political discourse falls victim to shorter and shorter attention spans, and the microchip gradually replaces the neuron.

Cosmic Afterthoughts by People With Too Much Time On Their Hands

Shouldn’t it be, “Treat or trick?”

Cruz Control

Fresh from his triumph of talking to himself on the Senate floor for a non record-setting 21 hours (thereby giving new meaning to the phrase, “Capital punishment”), Sen. Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz (R-TX) got into the weeds by venturing that he wouldn’t be willing to give up his paycheck should the GOP force a government shutdown.

That quote became politically toxic when Pentagon sources disclosed that the Armed Forces would have to forego getting paid for the interregnum should the GOP persist in its suicidal efforts to defund a bill that –- according to a CNBC poll -- 40% of the public does not want to see defunded and another 30% might well support if only they could understand it.

Had he not been enervated by his self- aggrandizing fauxlibuster, the Senator might have recalled that U.S. Senators are statutorily exempt from any such payroll cutbacks, so he could better have said (however cynically) “of course I’d be happy to give up my paycheck if our brave service-members are also to be so penalized”.

I suggest that the senator is capable of such irony in view of his assertion, some 17 hours into his self-absorbed monolog, that he would be perfectly happy if his speech got no press coverage whatsoever.

One is therefore led to speculate that, should Boehner & Co. succeed in gutting Obamacare, and a new, GOP-written chimera were to rise phoenix-like from its ashes, the Senator would be perfectly happy to see it tagged, CruzCare.

Hail, Britannia!

In an exceptionally long, 1200-word, tweet, our London correspondent (@oldblighty) has broken the exclusive story that  Buckingham Palace has dispatched the 74-gun ironclad, HMS Thatcher, a frigate of the Queen’s Own Royal Household Naval Squadron, on a punitive expedition to Syria.

The Palace announced that, by January, if the wind and tides are favorable, the ship will be in position to blockade Tripoli, which is quite near to Syria.

England’s notoriously contrarian Queen Elizabeth has outmaneuvered Parliament by citing a heretofore obscure clause of the Magna Carta, known as “Catch-1215”, which stipulates that “The Royal Navy can go wherever it f***ing well wants, whenever it “f***ing well wants to.

French president Hollande welcomed the news, saying, “The rosbifs have pulled off a tour de force* as rare as it is well done. Vache sacrée!**”

The White House, in a state of barely-contained glee, issued a press release that read, in part: “We will reserve comment until the ship passes the Red Line”.

The U.N. Security Council was in turmoil, issuing the following statement: “We are in turmoil; so what else is new?”

Follow #operationsaveface for further developments.
                          
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*English: tour de force
**English: Holy cow!

Barnstable Beat

Ran into my friend the Old Curmudgeon last week at at Jim Ellis’ blacksmith shop in Barnstable where he was having his edge honed.

The Ellis family have been forgers for a century or so, whereas  the curmudgeon has been crabbing full-time only since he retired, back at the turn of the century.

The mudge (as we call him when his hearing aids are turned off), likes to keep his edge keen, lest he be out-kvetched by one of the legions of arriviste curmudgeons being minted as the population ages.

“Those whippersnappers”, he fulminated, “where were they when the country started going to H-E-double toothpicks back in ‘63? …in pantywaists, that’s where!”

World-class curmudgeons like my friend know that there are guidelines for virtuoso grousing. First off, it helps to be a bit mossy; those who agree with you will think you a canny old geezer, while those who disagree will be unlikely to resort to actual mayhem lest they run afoul of Elder Abuse statutes.

Furthermore, old curmudgeon decidedly out trumps young curmudgeon, an oxymoron connoting mere peevishness and an annoying tendency to whine about nits**t.

I usually like to stick around to hear the Mudge’s gripe-du-jour, but when I realized that the sun had gone over the yardarm and the siren call of a frosty Beach Blonde reached my ears from the Dolphin down the street, I beat a hasty retreat to more convivial surroundings.

Protest-Coverage Guidelines

Our managing editor has issued the following guidelines for reporters regarding interviews conducted in connection with this publication’s dedicated, 24/7, non-partisan coverage of newsworthy (or not) protest marches:

Remember to have your iPhone, iPad and (if female) your iLiner with you at all times.

Refrain from undertaking interviews with prospects manifestly unlikely to advance the dialog; for example:

• Anyone whose response starts off with OMG or who pantomimes an “L” on their forehead with  thumb and index finger.
• Anyone wearing more than one nose ring.
• Anyone who is following Fox News tweets of the demonstration.
• Rep. Peter King.
• Anyone named after a constellation or other celestial body.
• Any adorable children (or animals) in costume, whether or not accompanied by an adult.
• Anyone wearing camo.
• Keith Olbermann
• Anyone wearing an aluminum-foil hat.
• Anyone au naturel.
• Wayne LaPierre

In sum, just exercise your usual discerning reportorial chops which, while having failed so far to garner us any distinguished journalism awards or attract any advertisers, have nevertheless won us a lasting place in the Pantheon of the terminally facetious.