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
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
