Yesterday afternoon, around two o’clock, shortly after the departure of a distraught and pessimistic German banker and moments before the arrival of a deliriously optimistic Greek economist, Gretchen poked her head in between the heavy oak doors that separate my office from the reception area. “Mr. Collins,” she announced with an uncertain smile, “your nephew Jason called. He sounded a little upset. He said he needs to talk to you.”
“Can’t he talk to his parents?” I asked rhetorically with an avuncular groan.
“He said he already has,” Gretchen replied, “He claims they’re all out of advice and suggested he call you.”
“All right,” I sighed, “See if you can convince the Somalian plenipotentiary for human rights that I’m running about twenty minutes late and tell Jason to call me then.”
Tom: Hello, Jason?
Jason: Hi, Tom. Can I talk to you about something?
Tom: You can talk to me about anything, you know that.
Jason: Yeah, sure… what I mean is, uh… Rob and Katje…
Tom: Your parents.
Jason: Yeah, I realize most people call them “Mom and Dad” but you know we’ve never been like that.
Tom: Because they’re only fourteen years older than you.
Jason: Fifteen.
Tom: Fourteen and a half. Look – I was there, okay? So don’t start with me about that. Actually, I think there ought to be more families like yours. What’s your problem with Rob and Katje?
Jason: They won’t take me seriously.
Tom: They won’t? About what?
Jason: Ted Cruz.
Tom: And why do you suddenly contribute an aerial fornication about Ted Cruz?
Jason: Because he announced he’s running for President – on Twitter!
Tom: And you’re all bent out of shape because your… parents… aren’t all bent out of shape about that?
Jason: Um… ah… well, yeah, I guess you could put it that way.
Tom: Seems to me, the root of your particular problem with Rob and Katje is, you don’t realize that nobody with their head screwed on straight takes Ted Cruz seriously. You running around yelling about Ted Cruz probably makes them wonder what kind of new recreational substances you’ve been abusing; and, if I know them, also wondering where they can get some.
Jason: No, you’re wrong. They’ve already said, if I’m doing any new weird stuff that’s making me take people like Ted Cruz seriously, they not only don’t want any of it, they want me to stop taking it and chill with some mellow stuff like shrooms and weed for a while until I get my upper and lower chakras aligned with my kundalini force.
Tom: Sounds like the kind of advice Katje would give – and Rob would agree with if you made a point of asking him about it. They say anything else?
Jason: They say they’re worried about whether I’m going to develop the right set of values.
Tom: Aha! There you go – even though they’re only old enough to be your brother and sister, they’re behaving like parents. Don’t let on about it, but I’m delighted; seriously, I didn’t know they had it in them.
Jason: For the record, Tom, you’ve always behaved like my uncle.
Tom: That’s what I’m here for, kid. Now, what’s got you so fixated with Ted Cruz running for President?
Jason: Jesus Christ, what do you think? Listen to what Ted Cruz says! Read what he’s written! The man’s a dangerous fascist lunatic!
Tom: Really? What makes you think that?
Jason: You’re kidding me!
Tom: Maybe. But… let’s face it, these days, here in Washington, you can’t spit without hitting a dangerous fascist lunatic. So tell me, how bad could this Ted Cruz character actually be?
Jason: Bad enough to stand up in front of a room full of Middle Eastern Christian refugees and call them all anti-Semites!
Tom: Oh, that. Look – Cruz was just displaying the usual pathological defense of Israel that all End Times believers put up any time anyone criticizes it. The Jews are essential players in their apocalyptic narrative, that’s all. They have to fulfill Bible prophecy and rebuild the Temple or Jesus won’t show up for the Battle of Armageddon. Of course, the story goes on to say that shortly after concluding their all-important bit part in the cosmic play, the Jews who don’t convert to worshipping Jesus as the Messiah get wiped out by the Antichrist and all go to Hell, but what can you do, right? Israel has to take its allies wherever it can find them, you know? After all, is it any surprise that a country that was good buddies with Pik Botha’s apartheid South Africa would cozy up to the demented Evangelicals whom Ted Cruz considers to be an essential part of his political base?
Jason: Whom? You’re using “whom” when you talk to me? What am I, some eighty year old college professor emeritus or something?
Tom: Sorry. I apologize for my use of correct English. But my point stands. His callous insults to the unfortunate refugees at the In Defense of Christians Conference were mere Realpolitik, that’s all.
Jason: Realpolitik? What’s that?
Tom: Um… ask our parents. So what else is bugging you about this Ted Cruz guy?
Jason: He said this winter’s record snow storms prove global warming is a hoax!
Tom: All the Tea Party Republicans say that kind of thing. Every time there’s a cold snap, an ice storm or a blizzard, they stand up in the House or the Senate and proclaim that all you have to do is look out the window in New Hampshire or wherever this morning, and by God, any idiot can see that this global warming nonsense is obviously some kind of hoax. And they’re right.
Jason: What do you mean, they’re right?
Tom: I mean that looking out the window on a snowy day without even the most rudimentary grasp of mathematics or science would definitely cause an idiot to convince himself that global warming is a hoax.
Jason: Oh, yeah… well… sure… I guess you are right about that.
Tom: And there’s no shortage of idiots following Tom Cruz around, now is there?
Jason: Sure as hell not.
Tom: Does that mean, as they say in New England, that light dawns on marble head? You getting it then, paisan? Capice?
Jason: He said there are more Communists than Republicans on the faculty of Harvard Law School!
Tom: That’s just an exaggeration. You can’t blame a politician for using those. If we did, nobody could get elected dog catcher, much less President of the United States. In fact, there are two and one half percent more Republicans on the faculty of Harvard Law School than there are avowed Communists, including the Trotskyites, but excluding the purely economic Marxists who do not, in fact, embrace the political aspects of dialectical materialism, although they may agree with Friedrich Engels on certain concepts pertaining to proletarian social dynamic theoretics.
Jason: Listen, Tom, this scum bag Cruz wants to trash Net Neutrality! He called it “Obamacare for the Internet!”
Tom: Which proves Ted Cruz can come up with the lamest, most absurd analogies since Senator Fred Thomson gave up running for President. So what?
Jason: All right, try this on for size – today, Ted Cruz announced he’s putting his family on Obamacare!
Tom: Yeah, I heard that about an hour ago.
Jason: Well, is that totally monumental hypocrisy or what?
Tom: Yes, it’s totally monumental hypocrisy. So what?
Jason: Give me a break, will you? For six years, the Republicans have dragged Barack Obama, a throughly decent, idealistic man, through the mud over his qualifications to even be President of the United States, based on a bunch of trumped-up, ridiculous rumors that he wasn’t a natural born US citizen and therefore his presidency is illegitimate under the Constitution!
Tom: And we all know that’s a lie. The President published his birth certificate for all the world to see. It’s a matter of established, irrefutable and undeniable public record that Barack Hussein Obama II was pulled from his blonde foxy momma’s milk-white teenage loins at the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital on the Island of Oahu in the State of Hawaii on the fourth day of August, in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-one at Seven Twenty-four PM. Yowza, yowza, yowza, yum, yum, yum… so it be written and Allah be praised, and the Prophet Mohammed, peace be unto him. End of story. So what’s your point?
Jason: That bastard! That filthy, stinking hypocrite! Why, by the Tea Party’s own criteria, that pandering, self-righteous Neanderthal whore Ted Cruz…
Tom: Jason! I think you owe bastards, persons of dubious hygiene, individuals with intense body odors, whores and Neanderthals an apology for comparing them to Ted Cruz!
Jason: Oh, all right, Tom. I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away there, but you know what I mean – how dare the Tea Party spend six years screaming lies that Obama was born in a foreign country and then turn around and drool all over Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada?
Tom: Well, there is, in fact, nothing in the Constitution that defines what a “natural born citizen of the United States” is, and there has never been a Supreme Court ruling on it, either.
Jason: The Supreme Court? Why should that matter?
Tom: Because the Constitution, my dear nephew, means exactly what the Supreme Court says it does, and nothing else. Provided, naturally, that there has been some legal case or another that made it to the Supreme Court, which the Court deigned to hear, and, of course, such decision applying only to those relevant parts of the Constitution the Court has seen fit to rule upon. Otherwise, what the Constitution means is pretty much anybody’s guess.
Jason: So who’s doing the guessing in this situation?
Tom: That would be the Department of State, with a little help from Congress, which, collectively, have issued regulations and passed laws that say, if at least one parent is an American citizen, and had resided in the United States, including its embassies and consulates, for five years, which need not be consecutive, after the age of twelve at the time of the child’s birth in a location abroad from the United States, its territories, possessions and the Marshall Islands, then that child is a citizen of the United States. And as it happens, as they say in Canada, whereas Ted Cruz’ mother, being a United States citizen from the State of Delaware and having resided in the United States for the requisite time period and having likewise met all the remaining requirements and criteria; it is the case therefore, that Ted Cruz is, as far as anyone can tell at this point short of a Supreme Court challenge, fully qualified, with respect to the citizenship clause of the Constitution, at least, to be President of the United States.
Jason: That’s not fair!
Tom: My dear nephew, as Jimmy Carter once reminded us all in his best pious tone, life is unfair. Would it help if I observed that, had Barack Obama in fact been born in Kenya as the legions of Tea Party birther nut-jobs insist, under current US law and regulations, as revised, et cetera, even he, too, would be likewise qualified?
Jason: No, it wouldn’t! How come the Republicans get to make up their own reality and we Democrats not only have to deal with real reality, but deal with the Republican’s crazy reality, too?
Tom: What do you mean, “we,” paleface?
Jason: Oh, all right, when I said “we Democrats” I meant me and Rob and Katje, okay?
Tom: That’s better. Look, Jason, life in the twenty-first century is so dreadful and complicated, that not everybody can cope with real reality. Things have gotten to the point where a lot of people need a made-up reality to believe in just so they can managed to survive without having a total nervous breakdown and ending up dressed in a urine-encrusted overcoat pushing a shopping cart full of junk around some inner city waiting for muggers and rapists to kill them. These people are not the sharpest tools in the shed, Jason. They’re ignorant, they’re stupid and they’re afraid – hell, they’re terrified. And it’s people like Ted Cruz who provide them with the comforting fantasies they need. Republican alternate reality is their fundamental survival mechanism. You can’t blame them for that.
Jason: I can if Ted Cruz gets elected President and he screws up my country!
Tom: I wouldn’t worry about that, if I were you.
Jason: Oh yeah? What should I be worried about, then?
Tom: Worry about what Hillary Clinton will do when she gets elected President. That’s far more likely, and frankly, considerably more frightening.
Jason: Huh?
Tom: Got to go now. I have an appointment arriving.
Jason: No, wait – What makes you say that?
Tom: Ask your parents, Jason. ‘Bye.