Here’s one that flummoxed my trusty Magic Eight Ball: Hey Eight Ball, what will that cheating orange sack of shit and surplus horse hair do next? Nobody at Mattel had the imagination to include a facet saying He will launch a transparently ham-fisted campaign to kneecap the Postal Service, which anyway is too many words, so all I got back was this:
My doctor, who these days is quite concerned about my blood pressure – would you have guessed I tend toward dangerous spikes in blood pressure? – doubtless would have advised me to leave it at that and go find a quiet corner in which to think about my happy place. Ignorance is bliss, what you don’t know can’t induce an aneurysm, etc. etc., which would maybe be a better way to go through what little life I have left, but isn’t a philosophy that squares all that well with my compulsive habit of watching six hours of MSNBC every day, is it? There never was any real hope I wouldn’t find out what the eight ball couldn’t say, not when you chuck in my Twitter addiction, so it wasn’t long before I caught wind of this:
In essence, a bunch of hired goons stealing mail boxes under what we lawyers call colour of right.**
It was all over the place. Everybody was talking. What was your first reaction when you got the news? The mind is a strange thing, so mine was to flash back to an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle. The one when robot mice were eating everybody’s TV antennas, remember that? No? I sure do. I must have watched it 50 times on one of the two channels available back in Halifax when I was in grade school – they had Rocky and Bullwinkle in heavy rotation in those days – and the mental image of those outsized metal munching rodents is absolutely indelible. I do forget why, exactly, the mice were going after the antennas, but it was easy to imagine it was some sort of nefarious but cockamamie scheme hatched by these two as part of their endless campaign to mess things up for the beloved homeland of Moose and Squirrel:
You don’t believe me about the mice and TV antennae? You think I’m having another one of my spells? Nyunh-unh, I can prove it, look:
If you were looking to compare strategies for screwing over your arch-nemesis, the thing cooked up by Boris and Natasha with the robot mice seems eerily similar to the scheme hatched by Donald and the unqualified stooge he installed as Postmaster General, more creative I guess, but likewise rife with Russian influence, and every bit as idiotically implausible. Or so you’d think, right? Oy gevalt, you’d think, what those dummies came up with, it’s so frickin’ stoopid you just gotta laugh – except was it, though? Was it really? Why, because any eight year old could have come up with a more nuanced strategy to sabotage mail-in voting than steal all the mail boxes? (Why not try the courts, laddie? Go for an injunction. Make some bogus constitutional argument. Or pass some sort of obstructionist regulations. There’s any number of options before the stampede to the mail boxes.) Well sure, smarty-pants, but it almost worked, didn’t it? If they could have mustered up a couple of more clues and pulled off the heist under cover of darkness, who knows, maybe nobody in Anytown USA would have noticed there was something different about the south-west corner of Fifth and Main for a couple of weeks or so, at which point Donny could just have shrugged and directed the reporters to go fuck themselves like usual. Other than that one small but fatal glitch in execution, the thing could have gone off without a hitch. Anyway, who cared, it wasn’t like Congress was going to do anything about it, not after Mitch told the Senate to skip town rather than let the Democrats paint them into a corner about saving the economy, and doing something to stop tens of millions of the destitute unemployed from being thrown out on to the street by their merciless landlords.
Actually, I’m a little surprised they back-pedalled. Yes, reporters had blown the whole operation in a way that made the caper look frankly as ridiculous as it was corrupt, and yes, vast swaths of the general public, among whom the USPS is a revered institution, were starting to kick up a fuss – but since when did the hue and cry of millions of outraged citizens, much less the plaintive bleating of the Fake News, do anything to dissuade Fat Donny? Since when was the Pussy Grabber-in-Chief ever shamed out of trying something wicked? It’s kind of strange. Maybe he figured the heat wasn’t worth it; the Post Office was royally screwed anyway, what with his hand-picked knave consigning all of those multi-million dollar automated sorting machines to the scrap heap, and the staff cuts, and the cancelled overtime, and all the rest. See I make fun, but actually they have been pursuing alternative strategies just a little more clever than mail box theft in broad daylight, and it was already at the point that a letter was taking sixteen weeks to get from Peoria to Scranton. That conniving Washington Post-owning prick Jeff Bezos was going to have to change the slogan of Amazon Prime to If it gets there at all, it’s early. The coming election was already well and truly rigged. Maybe making off with all the frigging mail boxes seemed like gilding the lily.
Anyhow, they stopped. They won’t be trucking all the mailboxes to an undisclosed location. Not that it makes any difference.
Geez, seems like just a couple of posts ago I was writing all dewey-eyed about hope! Hey, Eight Ball, buddy, that hopey-changey stuff was fully justified, yes?
Sure. Now it gives me the unflinching candour.
** My brother Mark always figured that Colour of Right would be a great name for a band. Maybe not as great or increasingly relevant as The Map Says We’re Fucked, but still pretty great.
Hey kids!! You can now watch the superb Rocky and Bullwinkle episode mentioned above!!
the needlefish 