Nothing takes the edge off a Washington winter quite like a visit to the Botanical Gardens. That’s not the National Arboretum, by the way – the best time to visit there is in the spring. The Botanical Gardens, however, can be most appreciated, in my humble opinion, in the winter, where stepping inside is like instant teleportation to the tropics. That’s where Cerise and I were this afternoon, intent on enjoying a pleasant Sunday in the company of exotic palms, orchids and ferns.
To tell the truth, though, it really hasn’t been all that cold here in DC lately. It hasn’t snowed seriously yet – just a few inconsequential flurries so far, and the streets are as clear of the stuff as they were in July. There hasn’t even been a killing frost – the lawns are still green, presenting a bizarre contrast to the naked oaks, maples, hickories, sycamores, dogwoods and red buds, which drop their leaves in response to diminishing light cycles, not decreased temperature. In fact, it’s been so mild that various plants not quite as wise as a poplar or beech, have foolishly concluded it’s March, or even April, and, with an absurd optimism worthy of Ronald Reagan himself, present the surprised peripatetic with the improbable spectacle of adventitious roses and sprouting bulbs amid the ubiquitous Christmas decorations adorning every house and lamp post. And, of course, technically speaking, winter doesn’t even officially start here until four minutes past seven in the morning on December 21st, anyway.
No, the weather on Capitol Hill, where Cerise and I attended a lavish holiday season brunch today at the home of one of her friends, was sunny and just a bit nippy – perfect, Cerise suggested, for a postprandial stroll around the Eastern Market neighborhood, some six or seven blocks from the Capitol itself. But after only a few minutes, we had to reconsider. It was the ginkgo trees, you see.
Ginkgos make excellent urban trees, very tough and resilient. They can stand up to all kinds of abuse and pollution, and consequently, the District of Columbia planted thousands of them all over the city. There’s just one small problem with ginkgo trees, though – their fruit stinks. How badly does it stink? Opinions vary, ranging from cat urine to Continental underarms to spoiled yak milk, but everyone who has smelled it agrees on one thing – it’s more than enough to make you hurl. The culprit, it turns out, is a compound called butyric acid, which the ginkgo produces in copious amounts. Strangely enough, if you have ever eaten American movie theater popcorn and ordered “butter” on it, you’ve probably tasted butyric acid, which, mixed with palm oil, a dash of carotene and traces of industrial preservatives, is the yellow stuff movie theater owners across this great land put on popcorn when their benighted patrons ask for butter. The salt on movie theater popcorn, at least, is the genuine article.
In high concentrations, however, butyric acid smells pretty awful, all right. For example, the Sea Shepherds, those intrepid, radical anti-whaling rascals, earnestly hoping to make the crews of Japanese harpoon ships as miserable as those harpoons make those poor whales, regularly toss containers of it onto their adversary’s decks, where they burst, making those “research” vessels reek like, well, Washington DC at the moment, actually. So it’s sort of a chemical weapon, which the wily ginkgo tree has been using to stink up the forest primeval since the days of the dinosaurs.
This year, in an effort to solve the problem, the DC government injected the trees with a plant hormone cocktail that was supposed to suppress fruiting. But instead, the whole thing backfired, resulting in a bumper crop of malodorous falling drupes, which squish, not unlike the unwelcome gifts of irresponsibly walked dogs, disgustingly underfoot, and stick to shoes, I might add, in a very similar manner.
One wonders if the DC government might have, perhaps, tried the treatment beforehand on a few ginkgo trees out in Rock Creek Park or someplace like that before going whole hog and injecting every damn female ginkgo tree in the whole city with the stuff. Come to think of it, since ginkgos come in two distinct genders, and the males don’t produce those reeking berries, one might also wonder why the DC government didn’t just plant only male trees to begin with. But hey, both of those ideas make far too much sense for something the DC government would do. So there we were, awash in the most horrid stench imaginable, as we hurried down to the foot of Capitol Hill and into the Botanical Gardens, which, thank God, have no fruiting female ginkgo trees.
The Gardens do, however, at the moment, anyway, have a Christmas toy train set up inside, which, predictably, had attracted hordes of screaming children. Still, such cacophony was, in my estimation, a small price to pay for surcease from the noble female ginkgo’s efforts to repel predators, now no doubt extinct for some hundred million years – obviously, I reflected, the ginkgos never got the memo. Cerise headed straight for the nearest lily exhibit and began cleansing her olfactory senses with their fragrance. I was about to join her when my Blackberry rang.
Cell phones are certainly a mixed blessing, aren’t they? On the one hand, they put you in constant and instant contact with everyone who knows your cell phone number, no matter where you are or what you are doing; and, on the other hand, they put you in constant and instant contact with everyone who knows your cell phone number, no matter where you are or what you are doing. Nevertheless, when I saw who was calling, I knew I had to answer – it was Rod Flaubert, one of Barack Obama’s speech writers.
Rod: Hi Tom. Hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.
Tom: Well, not too bad.
Rod: Jesus! What’s all that noise in the background? Where the hell are you, the monkey house at the zoo?
Tom: Something pretty close to it. What can I do for you?
Rod: Damn it, Tom, it’s just one of those things I can’t talk to anybody around here about, but I’ve got to talk to somebody about it, you know?
Tom: Sure, I understand. What is it?
Rod: It’s about Barack. You can keep a secret, right? This is just between you and me, okay?
Tom: I promise, I won’t breath a word of it to anyone.
Rod: Good. Look, you know how Barack pledged to quit smoking?
Tom: I’ve heard that.
Rod: Well, he’s trying, Tom, he really is.
Tom: That’s good. Smoking isn’t healthy for him, anyway.
Rod: Maybe, but him stopping isn’t healthy for the rest of us. You know that thing last week where a couple of my colleagues here on the Obama team posed with a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton?
Tom: You mean that picture that went all over the Internet after somebody posted it on Facebook, with one guy pouring beer in her mouth while the other guy copped a feel?
Rod: Yeah, that one. Hell, even Hillary thought it was funny. She even made a joke about it herself.
Tom: I heard it was actually one of her advisers who made the joke, but I’m sure he cleared it with her beforehand, so, yeah, that’s equivalent to Hillary making the joke herself.
Rod: Absolutely. But Barack didn’t think it was funny at all. And that worries me. The old Barack, the one that smokes, he wouldn’t have done it, I’m sure, but the new Barack, who hasn’t had a cigarette in over a week, he hauled them into his office and chewed them out for over half an hour!
Tom: Pretty grouchy these days, is he?
Rod: Grouchy? We’re all walking around on egg shells!
Tom: Well, he doesn’t have to quit cold turkey. Nobody expects him to do that. Didn’t he try the patch?
Rod: He did. Said it itched him like crazy. He couldn’t stand to wear it.
Tom: Nicotine gum? There are some pretty tasty brands on the market these days.
Rod: He tried that, too. Michelle started complaining about the noise.
Tom: Noise?
Rod: Yeah, after the nicotine was gone, he’d keep chewing, just forget to spit it out, and when he’d get going on some idea or something, talking about the presidential transition or fighting global terrorism or something, he’d start chewing really loud, and that smacking sound drove Michelle nuts.
Tom: How about those nicotine lozenges, then?
Rod: Oh, boy – those things! The first one he tried, it broke up on him and he got a huge dose of nicotine, all at once. He got wicked dizzy and had to sit down, then he started hiccuping and it didn’t stop for nearly ten minutes. Now he won’t go near those things.
Tom: I see. You know, it occurs to me that he said he wouldn’t smoke in the White House. That leaves him a pretty considerable loophole.
Rod: You mean, those little tobacco pouches you put between your cheek and gum?
Tom: Yeah. Couldn’t he use those?
Rod: Michelle won’t stand for it. She says, number one, they’re nastier than cigarettes; number two, they’re the kind of thing only lower-class bums like Joe the Plumber and cow chip tossing Red State hick crackers use; and, number three, they’re tobacco anyway, so it’s cheating. Plus, she says they make your mouth water, just like old fashioned plug chaw does, and she’s not going to go down in history as the First Lady who brought spittoons back into the White House.
Tom: I suppose she’s not going to let him try snuff, then?
Rod: Snuff? Barack says he tried that once when he was a teenager. He got a sneezing fit so bad, his nose bled. So, no, I don’t think Barack’s up to snuff.
Tom: So so to speak.
Rod: What?
Tom: Never mind. Look, it’s all well and good for Barack to have noble goals like quitting smoking, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s concerned about the prospect of a President with blurred vision and a nasty attitude placing his shaking finger on the nuclear button, ready to blow the world to Kingdom Come, all because his nicotinic neuroreceptors are screaming for an angry fix.
Rod: Yeah, well, I must admit, there have been some… comments like that going around. You have to understand, Tom, that Smoker Barack was a really fun guy. We loved working for him – he was the best boss a political operative ever had. You know how some of these fellows can be, regular Lyndon Johnsons, berating everybody, belittling them all the time, taunting, insulting, being condescending to everyone, making crude, vulgar, suggestive wisecracks at the drop of a hat – and Smoker Barack was the exact opposite of that! I think he must have had the best personality of any politician ever!
Tom: And now, Non-smoker Barack is not so cool, huh?
Rod: Not cool at all, Tom. Very uncool, in fact. He takes things way too seriously. He doesn’t get jokes anymore. Tell him a joke and he just sort of stares at you, like “What are you wasting my time with that [expletive] for?” And he gets obsessed with details now, Tom, and Smoker Barack never did that. Last night, he spent three hours in a meeting that should have taken maybe forty-five minutes, tops, going over the seating charts for the Inauguration. He argued with everybody there about every seat placement, yelling about who shouldn’t be allowed to sit next to whoever else, who has to sit to the left, who has to sit to the right, who has to sit behind who, all kinds of stuff Smoker Barack would never have cared about in the least! And then there are these Cabinet appointments he’s been making. Not just Hillary, either, although you and I both know she’s going to totally screw up as Secretary of State, just like she did when Bill put her in charge of health care during his first term.
Tom: By most estimates, she set reform back at least ten years.
Rod: Right. Rely on her to set our foreign policy back to the War of 1812! And keeping Gates on as Secretary of Defense! Smoker Barack would never have done that!
Tom: I suppose not.
Rod: Then he sends Susan Rice off to New York – to be United States ambassador to the UN!
Tom: That did strike me as kind of strange.
Rod: Then he appointed a retired four-star general as his national security advisor.
Tom: Yeah, and he’s added a gaggle of old Clinton people to his administration. He put a former Clinton Treasury Secretary at the head of his Council of Economic Advisors.
Rod: I know, and he appointed the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank to Secretary of the Treasury. And Paul Volcker, of all people, to head the Economic Recovery Advisory Board!
Tom: Hey, that’s right – Paul Volcker.
Rod: What about him?
Tom: He smokes cigars. You think maybe…
Rod: Not in Michelle Obama’s White House, he won’t!
Tom: Oh, okay. It just occurred to me, that maybe an occasional stogie with Old P.A. might serve to mellow the Pres out a bit. You can’t blame a guy for trying.
Rod: And I certainly don’t, Tom. But really, do Non-smoker Obama’s choices sound like a team that will change America? None of those people wants to change anything – they like things just the way they are! Smoker Barack talked about change, Tom. But Non-smoker Barack is behaving just like Bill Richardson or Christopher Dodd!
Tom: True, even John Edwards could have put together a more activist, change-oriented administration than what we’ve seen from your boss so far. But maybe its what history will later recognize as an extremely clever strategy, like Nixon going to China.
Rod: No, I think it’s more like all of his campaign promises going down the toilet.
Tom: Well, maybe he’s arranging things so that he, alone, among the members of his administration, is the sole agent of change, and therefore completely in control of it. Sort of like Charles de Gaulle, when he said “Je suis la France.” See what I mean? With cabinet picks like this, Obama’s saying “I am Change.”
Rod: Unfortunately, I think you might have hit the nail right on the head, Tom. Just like de Gaulle, Non-smoker Barack is some kind of humorless, self-righteous megalomanic.
Tom: But at times of great national emergency, like these, like the Great Depression, like the Civil War, those are the times that the President has to be strong and singular, Rod. Look at Franklin Delano Roosevelt, look at Abraham Lincoln.
Rod: Right, just as I said – they were humorless, self-righteous megalomaniacs, too!
Tom: You know what? I’ll tell you something, Rod, I don’t care if he is. If Barack Hussein Obama can get this country out of the God-awful mess George Walker Bush got it into, I don’t care if he smokes cigarettes in the White House or not. As a matter of fact, if he can repair all the things America so desperately needs fixed, and put us back on the track we were on before Bush got his greasy, simian mitts on the levers of presidential power, then as far as I’m concerned, Barack Obama can smoke crack in the White House!
Rod: Oh, my God, that’s it! Why didn’t we think of that?
Tom: No, no, wait a minute here…
Rod: Tom, it’s true what they say!
Tom: … now just hold your horses, okay?
Rod: … you really are a genius!
Tom: I swear, Rod, that was just figure of speech…
Rod: Outstanding! Awesome!
Tom: .. seriously, just a rhetorical flourish…
Rod: I’m so glad I called you!
Tom: … Jesus Christ, Rod, I didn’t…
Rod: I’ll send a check over to your office first thing tomorrow!
Tom: … literally mean that…
Rod: Great, yeah, sure, gotta go, right now. I have some very urgent calls to make. Thank you! Thank you, so much! ‘Bye.
Cerise sidled up through a knot of obstreperous tykes as I put my Blackberry away. “What was all that about?” she inquired in a puzzled tone.
“A gentleman with a smoking problem,” I replied dryly. “He’s moving into a new residence here in Washington, and his wife, well, you know, ‘rhymes with witch.’”
“Smoking?” She smiled with her usual gentle understanding. “She doesn’t want him stinking the place up, I suppose?”
“Something along those lines,” I averred.
“Well,” she pondered, “Washington jobs are usually pretty stressful. I remember when I worked at the EPA Systems Development Center, years ago, I would sneak out to the downstairs parking lot, on the loading dock, to grab a cigarette between the ongoing crises. That was the only place they allowed smoking, it being the EPA and all. And what I recall was, everybody I needed to talk to about resolving the outstanding issues was there, too, smoking a cigarette to calm down and cope with the stress. And you know what? We got a lot of crucial decisions made on that loading dock, almost always with positive results.”
“Actually, with respect to this fellow, there seems to be a certain, ah, school of thought that agrees with your analysis,” I confirmed. “But it looks like it’s a done deal.”
“Gee,” she observed, “considering what Washington smells like right now, maybe his wife ought to cut her poor husband some slack, even if it’s just for another two or three weeks. With this horrible ginkgo berry stench everywhere, who would even notice?”
“There’s the rub,” I responded ruefully. “The poor devil isn’t moving in until January.”
“What?” Her eyes went wide, “are you saying…”
“Just completely forget that I said anything at all,” I firmly advised. “Let’s go smell the flowers.”