George Washington is in the room. He is standing with his right arm extended in noble oratory fashion in a giant portrait behind a bunch of white lawmakers fronted by lead gasbag John Boehner, the house speaker of America Version 2012, who appears to be jawing on about the importance of self importance.
This MSN photo and story appeared on January 1, 2012 with the headline 40,000 New Laws Coming for 2012. That is a lot of new laws. And it proves one thing: America is a nation of overpaid and underworked legislative slackers with way too much time on their so-called public-service hands.
One of the oldest calls in the American political playbook is the hail public servant. US Legislators – members of the senate and house of representatives who are supposedly the voice of the people – grandstand public lives of altruism yet keep getting richer and fatter each year. They preach civil service while making secret handshakes. And to avoid expendability they keep making new laws.
I would like to slap Boehner and every other lawmaker in the photo in their ruddy, fuddy-duddy faces. Wheeling-and-dealing cheeks from both parties will do. I would like to slap them silly and ask them what the heck they think they are doing. Why are they making so many more laws when many of the ones they already have are not working?
I am no longer one of their constituents. I no longer earn money or pay taxes in America. I am an expat who no longer roots for the red, white, and blue. Being a fan of bogus public servants and their dirty domestic affairs is a game for losers. Unless you are one of them, on the inside track to their smoke-filled rooms of legislative power, you are about as dead and gone as dear George.
Yet Americans keep falling for the same trick plays. Like frenzied football fans they fawn over their phony one-track political ponies like diehard ducks in a fixed card game. They long only to belong. Blinded by the eloquent rhetoric of their favorite fantasy baby kissers, they neither understand nor care about the message or the messenger. All they really want is to feel like they are part of something greater than themselves, which is democracy itself.
I urge all Americans to slap the faces of their great grandstanders. Stop the bipartisan baloney and standup to today’s officeholders by saying enough is enough. Make America’s pompous politicians live up to their public service pledges by earning their salaries the old fashioned way – one axe and one cherry tree at a time – by working hard and dedicating themselves to preserving the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Of course, stopping Boehner and the USA’s warped windbag society is about as likely as stopping the next Super Bowl. Poor George and Emma Lazarus are rolling over in their graves. Happy 2012 indeed.