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Wednesday, December 6, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The monkey’s fist
If there was ever a time to
examine the wisdom and effi-
cacy of attempting to govern
320 million people as a single
entity, maybe now is it.
The GOP’s tax bill came
in at 479 pages. It’s a safe bet
that not one single profes-
sional representative — on
either side of the aisle — has
read the bill in its entirety;
not even Al Franken or John
Conyers, who clearly have the
time after tossing grenades
into their own offices. It’s an
even safer bet that no one, and
I really mean no single person
on earth, can have any idea
whatsoever of its ultimate
downstream effects.
This column is aware that
various think-tanks and agen-
cies of government have pre-
dicted this result or that, but
if you believe any of them,
or the pundits who cite them,
or have been conned into
plugging your numbers into
a BookFace algorithm to see
how the proposals are going
to change your life, I’ve got a
banana ranch in New Guinea
I’d love to sell you.
Depending on who you
believe — and I recommend
believing none of them — the
Affordable Health Care Act
and its attendant rules and
regulations resulted in some-
where between 9,000 and
33,000 pages. If there is, and
it is highly doubtful, a person
on earth who has read all of
those tea leaves they should
probably be put on display
in the Smithsonian, next to
the only person to have read
Finnegan’s Wake.
In the AHCA case, apolo-
gists for that mumbling and
hydratic demi-goddess known
as Nancy Pelosi worked over-
time to contextualize and
explain away her revealing
suggestion to us mere citizens
that: “We have to pass the bill
so that you can find out what
is in it.”
What chafes isn’t that she
said that — to a comedic mind
it’s infinitely pliable material
— it’s that her statement was
actually a window into exactly
the kind of governance we
can expect from both of the
compromised, spavined, and
arthritic major political parties
in Congress. It reveals an elit-
ist mentality that is perfectly
willing to reduce the sacred
trust of legislating — made-
for-TV rotunda-panderings
aside — to throwing dice
against a brick wall.
That should probably raise
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your hackles.
And it isn’t helpful when
a national press corps, which
should find political hand-
holding of any kind anathema,
is repeatedly caught prostitut-
ing integrity for political ide-
ology. As when, last week,
ABC’s Brian Ross leaned too
far into the General Flynn
story and crashed like Vinko
Bogataj’s epic ski-jumping
wreck on the Wide World of
Sports. The Agony of Defeat.
And the spectacles grow even
more pot and kettle: fea-
ture the now-disgraced Matt
Lauer — without even a hint
of pause — feeling confident
enough in his own powdered
wig to brace Bill O’Reilly
in primetime about sexual
harassment. Or when Charlie
Rose — who has spent the
better part of four decades
parading his credentials in the
elitist clubs of liberal aristoc-
racy — demands his secretar-
ies watch him take a shower.
Alas, the conundrum is
total. Erik Sevareid, one of the
few correspondents on earth
who could claim, without
Brian Williams-like irony, to
have been shot at by fascists,
communists, and Burmese
headhunters alike, long ago
warned that “Ignorant and
biased reporting has its coun-
terpart in ignorant and biased
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reading and listening.”
For that ignorance and
bias, which is our inherited
monkey’s fist, we have mostly
ourselves to blame. That’s true
because we, the unwashed
masses, seem to have lost, or
simply discarded out of intel-
lectual laziness and material
abundance, the once inveter-
ate American fear of being
ripped-off by politicians and
pamphleteers of any stripe.
And because we’ve lost
that essential trait — which is
useful for avoiding charlatans
and shills, and especially for
keeping them out of public
office, we elected a president
who reportedly delights in
berating menials, is a Howard
Hughes-like germaphobe, and
whose diet of Big Macs and
chocolate malts on Air Force
One is second only to his
utter lack of decorum and dis-
qualifying behaviors toward
women.
To paraphrase: He is bigly
wrong for the job.
Not that we had a stellar
alternative in Mrs. Clinton, a
woman most certainly tainted
by the same variety of crimes
and misdemeanors as anyone
now standing on the plat-
form of Mueller’s grand jury
guillotine.
You might rightly ask
yourself, and probably some
still cry themselves to sleep
each night wondering, if we
would have been better off
with Mrs. Clinton in the White
House. Die-hard believers in
Clinton as a divine savior will
remain beyond persuasion,
but intellectual honesty seems
to demand at least some level
of acknowledgement that she
was — and the evidence is
overwhelming — just men-
dacity dressed up in a differ-
ent wrapper.
Worse, now that we seek
to satisfy our expectations in
the mud, it seems likely that
we will wait a very long time,
maybe forever, before a truly
worthy and profound candi-
date, with any realistic chance
of winning, is ever seen again.
Which is almost beside the
point. A better question might
be to ask, given all of the pre-
senting symptoms of a now
obvious and metastatic cul-
tural disease — exactly how
it is we propose to treat the
patient.
Mostly, this column won-
ders at the probability, or
even possibility, of ever-again
wisely — and effectively
— governing a nation so
geographically large, so pro-
foundly angry, so diversely
needy, and so rapidly trav-
elling in so many contrary
directions at once.
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