A modest proposal...

You know, as much as I miss living in the DC area, I have to say I’m kind of glad that I’m not there at the moment because just hearing a few snippets of the posturing going on in Congress about using the budget as a weapon against the Affordable Care Act, via NPR, is enough to make me want to reach for the RPG. If I were there I’d be starting a crowdfunding campaign to put out a contract to terminate all 535 of them with extreme prejudice.

Honestly—we’d be doing the world a favor. The pity is that many of them have already spawned, and we’ve got a couple more generations of posturing, venal jellyfish coming down the pike.

Being a Liberal Arts major, naturally I turn to liberal arts methods of dealing with my disgust and fury at these self-serving twits who every year let what should be a normal, routine discussion on how we’re going to fund the country’s operations become a bloody crisis. Every year. Like it’s some enormous surprise. Every year. And while they’re grabbing at news cameras and bloggers, trying to ’splain why their position is anointed by almighty God and everyone else’s comes straight from [insert infernal, anti-American source here], I’m picturing…relief.

Or, at least not having to listen to their crap. I haven’t got as far as actual, you know, good government yet.

Here are my refuges.

I know that if there’s any sort of Higher Power at all, even as these sleazoids flap about in their $2500 suits, $350 haircuts, salon tans and lobbyist-subsidized surgical tune-ups, somewhere there are portraits of each and every one of them, reflecting the ever-increasing repulsiveness of souls so shriveled up as to pawn the lives of millions of Americans (not to mention screw the global economy) to score a few points with their most extreme constituents/paymasters.

Yes—I’m talking a “Picture of Dorian Gray”, times 535. A macabre museum full of paintings that make the most nightmarish expressionism look like a Kodak springtime moment.

In the absence of the Almighty, where are the Photoshoppers out there? They could be putting these together even as I write. They could compete with one another to show the corruption, greed and inhumanity that flow through these politicians’ veins where blood should be. I don’t get why no one’s done this—starting with Ted Cruz and John Boehner.

My second image is of Heracles’ fifth labor: cleaning the stables of King Augeas. The deal was: Heracles had to clean out the filth left by thousands of head of cattle, horses, goats and sheep in the Augean stables…in a single day. It was a dirty job; but back in those days, heroes didn’t stick at a little manure.

Well, okay—they didn’t have to deal with photo ops. But still…

Anyhow, to clean the stables, Heracles tore a hole in the wall at one side of the structure, and another opposite it. Then he dug trenches to divert the rivers Alpheus and Peneus through the stables.

(It worked, but then Augeas reneged on the deal, and eventually Heracles had to effect a do-over, in the form of getting rid of the Stymphalian birds—man-eating creatures that took over the countryside, destroying local crops, eating the citizens and producing highly-toxic, really disgusting guano. So—not too different from Congress, then.)

I wish some modern-day demi-god would run the Potomac through the Capitol—just gunge out all that bullshit accumulated over the past several decades. If some of the Congressional sheep and goats get washed away in the process, so much the better. I’m so sick of all of them—the nation couldn’t help but be improved if most of them were just swept out to the Chesapeake Bay.

No—looking at the magnitude of the problem, I realize that even in my scorn-fueled fantasies that wouldn’t work.

We’re gonna need a bigger river.