Just about eleven-thirty this morning, and because I was with a client at the time, Gretchen sent me an IM. I glanced at it as I listened to the final third of what had become a ninety-minute diatribe on the Euro, the Dollar, the Yuan, the Yen and the Pound. What the hell, I figure, if talking their heads off for the entire session makes someone happy, well, it’s their policy consultation, isn’t it? So as my latest guest droned on, I read Gretchen’s heads-up message, which informed me that my dear younger brother Rob Roy was out there in the waiting room with her, expecting to go to lunch. Fortunately, I didn’t have plans to dine with anyone else today, so when noon rolled around, Rob and I strolled outside into some totally strange ninety-five degree April weather.
Where, I wondered, is Senator Jim Inhofe now? When it snowed forty inches here in Washington six weeks ago, he made a big deal of building a snowman on the Capitol grounds, calling in the media to watch and claiming that the record winter weather proved global warming is a great big hoax. But when it got so hot during the second week of spring, it cooked Washington’s fabled cherry blossoms right off the trees, old Jimbo was nowhere to be found. As we settled down to some excellent Italian fare at Tosca on F Street, however, it became obvious to me that it was another Republican blowhard who had gotten Rob’s dander up.
“Tom,” he proclaimed between bites of his prosciutto di Parma con La Tur, insalatina di cannellini e olio ai pistacchi appetizer, “when I heard that Bob McDonnell, the governor of Virginia, the state where I live, had declared April to be ‘Confederate History and Heritage Month,’ that was bad enough. But when I read what he said…” With that, Rob reached into his tech vest and pulled out a folded pieced of paper. “…that was the last straw! And this…” he sputtered, spraying bits of cheese and cannellini beans all over my quaglia arrosto con il suo uovo, frisee, salvia fritta e pancetta, “this is what I plan to do about it!”
“You’re going to write Governor McDonnell a strongly worded letter?” I asked, frankly flabbergasted. Rob hates to write letters. Our mother used to have to threaten him with all sorts of dire punishments in order to get him to write our various relatives and thank them for Christmas and birthday presents. She has also told me that not once during the entire four years Rob was away at college did he ever even send so much as a Mother’s Day card. So I knew Rob wasn’t kidding when he said he was hopping mad at Bob McDonnell.
“You do know,” I sought to verify, “that McDonnell issued an apology yesterday, don’t you?”
“An apology?” Rob scoffed. “Did he apologize for declaring April, 2010, Confederate History and Heritage Month? No, he did not! All that pinhead apologized for was not mentioning slavery when he did it.”
“Governor McDonnell,” I reminded Rob, “explicitly said in his apology that not mentioning slavery was ‘a serious omission,’ and, furthermore, that slavery was, and I again, I quote: ‘…an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders.’ You have to give him credit for owning up to his mistake, don’t you? And besides,” I reasoned, “it’s not like McDonnell invented the idea of Confederate History and Heritage Month. It was George Allen who did that.”
“It was George Allen,” Rob fumed, waving his letter around dramatically, “who flew the Confederate flag, too.”
“Not over the Virginia Capitol,” I clarified. “He just liked to hang it over his fireplace, wear a Stars-and-Bars lapel pin, that sort of thing.”
“The fact remains,” Rob persisted, “that ever since George Allen declared the first Confederate History and Heritage Month in Virginia, every Republican governor of the state has done it, too!”
“Virginia,” I tactfully pointed out, “isn’t actually a state. It’s the Commonwealth of Virginia, you know.”
Rob slammed his letter down on the table. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning Virginia wants to be thought of as what it really is – a place entirely obsessed with the past. That’s why Virginia goes around having Confederate History and Heritage Months and getting all excited about celebrating the one-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, starting next year in 2011.”
“What Virginia did in 1861,” Rob protested, “is nothing to celebrate! There were half a million slaves Virginia when Richmond became the capital of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy killed nearly seven hundred thousand Americans! What’s more, Virginia actually bred human beings, like livestock, on farms designed for producing slaves as a product for export to other southern states! Celebrate the Confederacy? George Allen and Bob McDonnell might as well suggest everybody celebrate Soviet Gulag Day – or maybe declare Pol Pot Appreciation Week; or have a Serbian Ethnic Cleansing Festival this summer down at Virginia Beach!”
“Yeah,” I conceded as the bus boy cleared the empty appetizer plates and our waiter laid out my risotto con aragosta, basilico e ricotta fatta in casa and Rob’s filet mignon alla griglia con polenta soffice, cavolo nero e salsa alla coda di bue, “McDonnell’s pretty messed up, but so what else it new? Here,” I continued, motioning for Rob to hand me his letter, “let me see that.”
“Good,” Rob nodded as he began tucking into his filet mignon, “that’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”
So, between bites of lobster, I read Rob’s angry letter to Governor McDonnell. “Now wait a minute here,” I cautioned, taking a yellow highlighter from my coat pocket and going over several particularly ripe passages with it, “you can’t,” I warned Rob, pointing out what he had written, “send a letter to a public official with something like that in it.”
“Why not?” Rob bristled. “This is supposed to be a free country, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I admitted, “it is indeed supposed to be. On the other hand, the FBI arrested two men this week, one for threatening the life of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and another for threatening Senator Patty Murray of Wisconsin. Both guys were seething with rage about the health care bill getting passed, so they went and shot their mouths off, and now look at them – facing serious time in a federal pen. This,” I said, tapping the yellow block on the page, “has got to go.”
“But that’s not a threat to kill anyone,” Rob shot back indignantly.
“Listen,” I warned him, “you can’t be too careful these days. If a person gets their head dunked in the bowl of an active pressure toilet and somebody flushes it… what does it say here… a dozen times? Face it, Rob, it’s entirely possible that the flush-ee in that situation could drown. So, it’s entirely possible to construe such a statement as a threat. You have to take it out. Then there’s this thing you wrote where you say you think the Jolly Green Giant ought to give McDonnell ‘the biggest wedgie in human history.’ You’re going to have to remove that, too, Rob, because, although there has never been a single case in the entire annals of medicine where a massive wedgie has proved fatal to a human being, there are, in fact, several instances where it resulted in serious scrotal injury.”
“As if,” Rob sneered, “Bob McDonnell has anything to worry about in that department!”
“Listen, little brother,” I advised, “anybody who declares a Confederate History and Heritage Month in the Year of Our Lord two-thousand and ten in a place with a million and a half black people living in it has got to have a rather large set of stones.”
“Or tends to behave like a total fool,” Rob interjected.
“Granted,” I duly noted, “the two are quite often found together.” Now, this next part,” I told him as I highlighted another Rob Roy gem, “where is says, ‘I hope you get malignant, incurable cancer all over your body,’ that’s got to go, also.”
“Why?” Rob griped self-righteously through a mouth full of filet mignon, “I said I hope gets really sick. So what?”
“So,” I volleyed back, “as we both know, certain chemicals can cause cancer. Therefore, saying you hope he gets cancer is tantamount to threatening to expose him to carcinogens against his will…”
“Threatening to expose the freakin’ governor of Virginia,” Rob seethed after washing down his beef with an ample swig of brunello di Montalcino, “ – a state where they practically invented smoking tobacco – to carcinogens? I bet thirty percent of his salary comes from tax revenue on cigarettes that exposed hundreds of millions of people to carcinogens!”
“My problem with you suggesting that McDonnell develop cancer,” I carefully explained, “is that it’s too plausible. These days, when you want to express unbridled, totally irrational rage with something a public official has done, you have to make sure that what you say is obviously metaphorical.”
“Okay, then,” Rob shrugged, “what would you recommend instead?”
“Say you hope he gets leprosy,” I suggested. “There’s no way Bob McDonnell could ever actually contract leprosy; plus, it’s a really striking image from a rhetorical standpoint, not to mention all the widely-recognized connotations of the word ‘leper.’ Nobody, especially a totally pathetic, shamelessly incompetent, third-rate hack lawyer like Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli could convince judge nor jury that you were, when you wrote that, actually threatening to infect Bob McDonnell with an actual case of leprosy.”
“Can I say I hope he catches herpes from Ann Coulter and that his wife gets the clap from Rush Limbaugh?” Rob asked, obviously trying to see what he could get away with. “Neither of those is fatal.”
“Absolutely not,” I admonished. “There’s no place for such sentiments, no matter how obviously absurd, no matter how patently implausible, no matter how transparently fictitious, in even the most understandably irate, justifiably indignant response to the most idiotic, moronic, half-witted, insensitive abuse of political office by the lowest, most reprehensible, pandering jackanapes; unless, of course, it can be accomplished anonymously on the Internet.”
“All right,” Rob reluctantly agreed, making a note in the margin of the page, “leprosy it is.”
“Now, these two paragraphs here,” I pointed out, “where you call him ‘a politically depraved, atavistic monster who kisses up to racist redneck bigots,’ and so forth, that’s okay, because you said ‘politically’ before all of those other things. But this next part that comes afterward, all this stuff about bicycle seats, outhouses and consanguineous relations of various kinds, all that’s got to go.”
“Aw, come on, Tom,” Rob groused. “I spent, like, over half an hour on those two paragraphs alone!”
“And it’s quite obvious,” I assured him, “that a great deal of thought went into them, but you cannot, under any circumstances, mail such… literary creations to public figures, especially the public figures of a society as prudish, unsophisticated and ignorant as Virginia’s.”
“Excuse me,” Rob japed, “but I’m from New York, and I haven’t noticed that any of my neighbors are particularly prudish, unsophisticated or ignorant.”
“You,” I responded dryly, “live in Fairfax. Nobody who lives in Fairfax, Loudon County, Arlington or Alexandria really lives in Virginia. You live in Washington, DC, just like the people in Montgomery County and Prince Georges County, Maryland do. The real Virginia is an hour’s drive away from your comfortable, upper-middle class existence, Rob, and it’s not pretty.”
“Okay then,” Rob proposed, “how about I say I hope he wakes up some morning and he’s black – but he’s still in Virginia, and it’s 1845?”
“Well,” I admitted, “that’s completely surreal, and therefore safe to say, and I must agree that it would certainly serve him right. My only constructive criticisms of your suggestion are that it’s utterly impossible and, what’s more, I think it sounds like use of the idea might be copyright infringement – not that it should matter in a private letter; but then again, it’s 2010, you’re sending the letter to a public official, the intellectual property bastards are everywhere, and I am not a lawyer; so best to be on the safe side. So, how about this instead – say you hope he gets the 2012 Republican Vice-Presidential nomination and ends up on the bottom of the ticket with Sarah Palin.”
“Wow,” Rob commented as his eyes widened. “Yeah, that would definitely be worse than his wife catching the clap from Rush Limbaugh.”
“Of course it would,” I vouched. “It would be a fate of truly hideous aspect. After all, there’s a cure for the clap, but there’s no cure for Sarah Palin.”
“All right,” Rob chortled as he scribbled away, “that one’s in then. But what could be worse?” Rob stopped to ponder the question for a moment. “Jesus H. Christ, Tom, could anything be worse?”
“Only two things I can think of,” I assured him.
“Which would be?” Rob gazed at me, filled with expectation, his pen poised above the paper.
“Say that, whatever his next election campaign might be, you hope the Ku Klux Klan endorses him.”
“Oh, yeah!” Rob exclaimed, writing away for all the world like Tolstoy in the throes of a mystic vision. “And what else?”
“Say you hope Alan Keyes holds a press conference and forgives him.”