I was enjoying a leisurely and authentic gourmet Italian lunch at Tosca on F Street when my Blackberry started vibrating. I hesitated before answering it, but then figured what the hell, my sister-in-law Katje has never, ever called me for a frivolous reason. My gut instinct was she needed my help with her husband, my dear younger brother Rob Roy, who, despite being a fairly intelligent guy, nevertheless regularly proves he has more cajones than smarts. No doubt about it, Rob’s got a pair of huevos enormes mas grandes on him, and more often than not, he lets his dipstick do the thinking. And as usual, my gut instinct was right.
Tom: Hi, Katje, what’s up?
Katje: It’s Rob. He’s in jail.
Tom: Where?
Katje: In Atlanta.
Tom: What was he doing there, of all places?
Katje: His company, Whizzonator-YoyoDyne Information Systems, sent him down there to attend a corporate skills-sharing conference on Java development using the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration.
Tom: They sent a Java developer to a CMMI conference?
Katje: Yeah.
Tom: So, let me guess – he slugged a Level Five subject matter expert and got arrested?
Katje: No, no, the conference went just fine. Rob did what all Java developers do at software structured methodology and quality techniques conferences.
Tom: He slept through it?
Katje: Of course – except when he was playing World of Warcraft on his laptop or, you know…
Tom: Surfing the Web for porn on company time.
Katje: It’s harmless, I figure.
Tom: So far, anyway. Okay, so what happened in Atlanta?
Katje: Well, there was supposed to be this big banquet at the end of the conference on Saturday night, then everybody was supposed to fly back to their respective Whizzonator-YoyoDyne offices around the world. But the conference ended Friday, and the corporate types had planned that everybody would have Saturday afternoon off, you know, to sightsee or whatever, in Atlanta.
Tom: Uh-huh. I can imagine – all the wonderful tourist attractions in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. There’s the botanical gardens, the zoo, the aquarium, the Coca-Cola plant, the public library…
Katje: Yeah, yeah, right, you got it – so about four in the afternoon, Rob was bored silly, wandering around Centennial Olympic Park. Then he saw this right-wing rally with Dick Armey shooting his mouth off about there being nothing in the Constitution about health care, and everybody holding up pictures of President Obama as Keith Ledger’s Joker captioned “Socialism,” or with a philtrum moustache looking like Adolf Hitler, or fake red Soviet flags with hammer-and-sickle logos and the name “Obama” stitched onto them in hokey lettering that was supposed to look like Russian, or pictures of aborted fetuses with Obama’s face PhotoShopped onto them; and fake advertisements for undertakers and grave diggers offering a “Democrat sign-on bonus,” placards that claimed single-payer health care kills millions, pictures of people in wheelchairs captioned “Socialized Medicine Will Put Them All in Death Camps,” pictures of empty nooses hanging from trees captioned “Impeach Obama,” and hand-made cardboard signs that called the President, his family, the Democrats and liberals all kinds of awful stuff – traitors, murderers, Nazis, poisoners, Communists, pedophiles, “economic terrorists,” sex perverts – you name it, Tom, every moronic, stomach-churning slur a semi-literate, inbred backwoods cretin could possibly think of, it was there!
Tom: Katje, when are you and Rob going to realize that every American, regardless of creed, color, national origin or social class, has a God-given, inalienable constitutional right to publicly express any idiotic, bigoted, absurd, mean-spirited, self-serving, hateful, half-baked, spiteful, misinformed idea that pops into their blessed, star-spangled, Yankee-Doodle noggin, be that noggin as hard as New Hampshire granite, as soft as Mississippi mud or as mentally inactive as a California avocado?
Katje: Oh, come on, Tom! Free speech is one thing, but this was…
Tom: In the case of Schenck versus the United States, back in 1919, the Supreme Court established a standard of free speech, Katje. To transgress it, you have to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Anything short of that has to be overt public obscenity…
Katje: So calling the President’s children disturbing, unspeakable things at a public rally supposedly concerned with health care issues isn’t obscene?
Tom: Neither you nor I can determine what is obscene. Only the Supreme Court can do that. They can’t define it, but by Jiminy, they know it when they see it!
Katje: Okay, while we’re waiting, then, my husband – your baby brother, is rotting in jail…
Rob: I am not rotting!
Tom: Rob?
Katje: He’s been on conference call with us from the beginning, Tom.
Tom: Rob, where are you?
Rob: I’m in the Atlanta jail.
Tom: Good Lord, bro, what for?
Rob: For punching out a fascist imbecile after that disgusting rally!
Tom: Jesus Christ Almighty, Rob! What happened?
Rob: Well, I watched those people make absolute, hypocritical fools of themselves for about twenty minutes, then I wandered around for another fifteen minutes or so and found this bar. So I go in, and it’s pretty nice, which, in Atlanta in the summer, means that it’s heavily air conditioned and doesn’t smell like stale beer and vomit, right? And I order a Jack Daniels on the rocks, which I figure even somebody in Atlanta, Georgia, who thinks they’re a bartender can make without screwing it up, okay? And less than a minute after I take my first sip, in pours this crowd of numbskulls from that farce in the park. So, I just ignore them, you know, but this pinhead in, like, camouflage, grasshopper shades and a beret, you know, decides to sit down next to me at the bar and strike up a conversation.
Tom: Holy Mother of Mary – about what?
Rob: About my tats, of all things! He points at mine, then he points at his – he’s showing me like, his Aryan Brotherhood tat, his Turner Diaries tat, his Ku Klux Klan tat, his Timothy James McVeigh Memorial tat, his Black Helicopter Watch tat, his 100th UFO Sighting Commemorative tat, his Spiderweb tat – and I’m like, yeah, yeah, nice tats, dude, but he keeps on coming, it’s unreal. I mean seriously, if he wasn’t obviously some kind of rural demonstration of what happens when cousins marry, I’d figure he was a rough trade gay who was trying to pick me up!
Tom: Understandable. So then what?
Rob: So then, he asks me how I like the rally, and I told him.
Tom: And you think that was a good idea?
Rob: Didn’t I just hear you tell Katje that every American has a more or less absolute right to free speech – subject, of course, to certain common-sense restrictions like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater or putting up a NAMBLA Web site?
Tom: Having the right to do something doesn’t automatically make doing that thing a good idea, you know. How come you’re in the Atlanta jail?
Rob: That guy and me, we got into… I donno… a discussion of the rally, I guess. He said Obama wants to have panels of egg-head college professors and fat, nasty, ugly social workers who have never, ever been laid decide who lives and who dies. And I said that’s a bunch of baloney, it’s lies the insurance companies made up to scare people and there’s no actual evidence that anything even remotely like that is going on. So he gets riled up and says socialized medicine is an evil plot spawned by the Muslim extremists who control the Obama Administration. So I say that’s totally paranoid nonsense, I bet he’s got relatives over sixty-five years of age who use Medicare services, and Medicare is socialized medicine, and Medicare was invented by Lyndon Johnson, and who were the Muslim extremists that controlled his presidential administration? So then he says, once Obama gets his way, everybody’s relatives over sixty-five are going to be arrested by goon squads recruited from the ranks of illegal aliens the NAACP pays the Mexican Mafia to smuggle across the border to take jobs away from white folks; and all those old people are going to be dragged away in the night to massive extermination camps currently under construction in the Nevada desert, and I say, “You’ve been watching way too much Glenn Beck, dude, get your act together and familiarize yourself with reality for a change,” you know, just to get his attention. So then he said, “Sounds to me like you’re some kind of elitist who loves taxes!” So I say, “Okay, I’m aware that nobody likes to pay taxes, and I certainly don’t get any pleasure out of it; and, what’s more, I know that the tax code is really hosed up and gives a lot of people who don’t deserve it huge breaks most of us will never have, and, on top of that, I have no illusions about what government does when it gets the money. A lot of the money the federal government, not to mention state and local governments, gets from taxes is totally squandered on nepotism, incompetence and corruption and I don’t like that any more than anybody else. But the bottom line is, the mere fact that governments spend taxes creates jobs, improves the quality of life and stimulates the economy; so even if the people who work for our governments are despicable, masturbatory, nose-picking, pants-soiling, malodorous nitwits, the fact that they are there, spending our taxes benefits us all anyway! As a matter of fact,” I told him, “if it meant that everybody in America could have a job, a decent place to live and fair, humanitarian health care, I’d be willing to pay even more taxes than I do now!”
Tom: You said that – in public – below the Mason-Dixon Line?
Rob: Yeah.
Tom: You’re a better man than I, Rob Roy Martini.
Rob: Thanks, bro.
Tom: And then what happened?
Rob: Well, by that time, about half a dozen of his buds had surrounded us there at the bar, you know?
Tom: And?
Rob: So then, he says, “I bet you voted for Obama, didn’t you?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s a free country, so what if I did?” And he says, “You know what that makes you?” And I said, “Yeah – smart!” And he says, “No, it makes you a [expletive] lover!”
Tom: Ah, actually, if you get right down to it, most of the people protesting against the Obama health care plan aren’t doing it because they care about – or even vaguely understand – the arcane policy issues of the various public program alternatives to the current status quo. I’d say, it’s pretty obvious that they’re like the townspeople of Rock Ridge, in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles.” In the movie, they couldn’t accept that “the sheriff is a [expletive].” Same difference. These retards can’t deal with the fact that the President is a [expletive]. So whose problem is that?
Rob: Last Saturday afternoon, it was mine! I had to kick about eight Georgia rednecks all around that bar!
Tom: After they attacked you, I assume?
Rob: What? Stugots, paisan! Does this New York Italian start fights in bars? Nobody in their right mind starts a fight in a New York Italian bar, and I grew up in New York, didn’t I?
Tom: And then what?
Rob: And then I got arrested! What did you think?
Katje: And he’s still locked up in the Atlanta jail! Which is why I called you!
Tom: Okay, so, yeah, Rob, can you explain that?
Rob: Sure – the Atlanta cops dragged me into Saturday night court along with the eight southern simpletons I smacked around, and the judge listens to what the cops told him and then sets a court date some time next January, and then he lets all of them go on personal recognizance. Then he says I have to post eight hundred dollars bail!
Tom: And so?
Rob: And so I refused!
Tom: You and Katje pull down over one hundred and seventy grand a year, and you won’t pay a bail bondsman eighty bucks on your credit card so you can get out of the Atlanta jail? What are you, nuts?
Rob: It’s not the money, Tom, it’s the principle of the thing!
Tom: What principle?
Rob: That a crazed mob of right-wing dunces can try to… damn it, Tom, try to [expletive] kill me in a bar, and get let out of jail for nothing, and I have to pay…
Tom: Look, dude, those misguided, pathetic nitwits are all probably local to Atlanta, okay? The South is full of pathetic local misguided nitwits. You, on the other hand, are from out of town. The idea, dude, is for the judge to make sure you and they show up for the criminal trial, that’s all. And since you’re from Washington, DC, the judge wants to give you some kind of incentive to drag your sorry carcass back down to Atlanta for the impending legal proceedings concerning these ridiculous shenanigans which are scheduled to occur next January, okay? So get the puck out of there, hockey star! Nobody, anywhere contributes an aerial fornication about what you consider to be your sacred principles! Besides, I bet you’re going to get off on the criminal assault charges, no problem, with a plea of self-defense. But my intuition tells me, you have another, much more significant problem.
Rob: Oh yeah? What?
Tom: Getting sued in civil court by those eight Georgia rednecks you beat up.
Rob: Why?
Tom: Because it’s dollars to donuts, little brother, that none of those bozos has any health insurance.
Rob: Oh, [expletive]! You’re right. I’m outta here!
Tom: As well you should be.
Katje: Thanks, Tom.
Tom: No problem. Just one favor, if you don’t mind.
Katje: Anything.
Tom: Be good to my damn fool kid brother when he gets back to Fairfax.
Katje: No problem, Tom. Believe it or not, that’s what I love to do.