Saturday, April 16, 2016

Saturday commute cxxvii: Once more into the brief







Who knew, the bright American latrine
would come not merely to typify the
nation's discourse in the great quad-
rennial spat for bragging rights to
power, wealth, and the pressing busi-
ness of genital selection, but to afford
its venue? Well, you may say, dread of 
this had lurked in the stalls of reason-
able people, ever since Conservatism 
cornered righteousness and Liberalism
bagged discrimination. All it would
take to smash the persistence of these
two prosperous plantations, would be
a financial catastrophe exposing every-
one but the malefactors, to what com-
placent gravy trains they had been.

But that political candidates might
flee to the latrine, that first, last,
and saddest refuge of narcissism, with-
out anticipating the vanity mirror's re-
versal of their logotype, was a strange 
oversight in this advanced day and age
of resort to the self-referencing server. 

True, tacticians for Mrs Clinton had 
the foresight to adopt the reversible
logotype, the letter "H," ambidextrous 
as the day is long; but they then went on, 
to cripple it with a directional arrow of
inscrutable destination -- which no one 
could indict, and anyone could deny,
as progressive or regressive. At the same 
time, how soon we forget how forlornly
Jeb's exclamation frond asserted a "right 
to rise," against his Party's own defining
defense of the status quo of latrines. At 
least the logo for the sociopath from Texas 
led with the first syllable of being trussed, 
and ended with the last of the past tense.
Now, that was coherency worthy of a 
Princeton panty raider, par excellence.

Eventually, incrementally, mercy broke 
upon this sourest of settings, with the 
freshening of satire's sure restorative -
an SNL sketch on what to do, in one pair,
of clean underwear, dried on a radiator.
In a time of logotype reversals, would
politics acquire a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind?



























Peter Stackpole
Drying on a radiator
Saipan
1944







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