I was living in France in 1991. The US Senate, in televised sessions, was discussing the porn star Long Dong Silver as part of their august deliberations on whether to advise and consent to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. This puzzled my French friends and they asked me to explain it. I told them that our politicians were clowns and that this is how they entertain the mob and keep their jobs. I would prefer that our politicians were not clowns and that when a frenzy agitated the people those elected to lead us would moderate the popular passions as the Founders intended and protect us from our baser impulses. But I don’t live in that alternate universe.
Instead, as they almost always do in this world, as they did in the Red Scare, the Japanese-American internment camps, the McCarthy witch hunts, the Patriot Act, and the Clarence Thomas hearings, they crowded out of the little Volkswagen in their clown suits and makeup, running circles under the Big Top in front of the mob in the stands, waving a rope screaming “Lynch ‘em!”, this time in the televised AIG hearings on the House side of the circus. Nancy, Barney, and Chris channeling Larry, Moe, and Curly. It truly is The Greatest Show on Earth. Not just the demagoguery and incitements to murder, but solid, unconstitutional legislation.
Thank God Clarence Thomas was confirmed and when this latest nonsense gets to him at the Supreme Court he will form part of the majority that will, wearily, once again save us from our elected stooges.
