What a day yesterday. I don't think I was still awake when the story broke, but I was hearing it on the radio in the morning. NPR follows these kinds of stories but CNN grabs them like a mad dog and won't let go. Panel after panel of pundits analyze every little angle and I love it. It used to be the Sunday shows were like that but anymore they have whoever the dems or the reps send and they try to get something out of them but they just repeat the party line, and then they bring in surrogates for each side and they just bash each other over the head, and it's all heat and very little light.
What was surprising from the start was that several reps were calling for recusal. Usually they all line up behind Dump. Well geez it seemed pretty obvious that he lied. His only defense seemed to be that he was a befuddled old man and didn't know what he was saying. The CNN panels were pretty unanimous that he should recuse (there was an undercurrent of thought that he should resign but everybody knew that that was never ever going to happen), the Foxies were sticking to the befuddled old man defense, but even there there was some light. I was surprised to hear one of their guys, Shepard Smith holding the light of Diogenes without burning his fingers. Dump was making a speech on some aircraft carrier they have been building for like ten years and won't be done for five or so more and all he had to say was he didn't know nothing about it.
Finally a little after three he recused. himself, mumbling like a befuddled old man. Who will take over the investigation? Will they appoint an independent prosecutor? Did Dump actually collude with the Russkies? Seems kind of far out, but then this is Dump.
I don't know if we should always reexamine our beliefs when something new comes down the pike, because stuff comes down the pike at a pretty brisk rate, but I do think we should do it pretty regularly. I like to think I do. I know I do go through a procedure, the crucible if you will, but I have to wonder how unbiased my reanalysis is. Certainly I think that we should have wide open eyes and wide open minds when we enter the halls of The Institute.
See here is the thing with us liberals, the enlightenment's children, we believe we have the facts on our side and that if we can only reason with the other side they will come over to our side, but in light of these studies maybe it can't be done. More on this later of course.
I went to Austin because it was a well known boomtown and I knew two people who lived there. It also had that fabulous music scene, but I don't like going to a bar where I have to sit and listen and can't flap my jaws, so that was not an attraction. I didn't know about the food until I got there.
Austin is indeed the town with the bats. There are bats beneath the broad bridges that cross the Colorado River and at sunset you can see them swarm out from under. Magnificent. Before I went there I thought everybody would be wearing cowboy hats and boots. It turned out not so much the former, but almost always the latter.
So this property division. The AG had tons of property, and every piece had an identification number. Well in theory, in practice many pieces had no number and many numbers had no pieces, There were some of these old timey printouts on that green striped paper that was so popular at the time, and it was probably mostly right, but that just means a little more than half the time. Every year all the state agencies submitted their property records and the AG always stunk up the joint.
No more Morris/Mars told me, he wanted me to set this right. Me? With this crew of clowns? Well, you know, I came to Texas to seek my fortune, and now I was facing a test, was I going to back down or was I going to put my back into it? I was going to give it my all, I was going to cajole, threaten, sweet talk (I had no power over these clowns, I won't recount my experience in management, but they know I had been given a mission by Mars, and that gave me some leverage) and by gum I was going to succeed in this mission.
Or not, It turned out to be not. I did get one perk out of it, nobody wanted to go to El Paso to crawl on the floor and look for numbers on the bottom of desks, but I had the Marty Robbins song in my heart and volunteered.
Mexican guy drove the taxi I took from the airport. I guess he had become a US citizen or green card or something because he was going on about how great it was to live in the USA, good money, good housing, his daughter was going to a good school and making good grades. Was there anything I would like? Good tequila? Good cigars? A good woman?
A woman? Well I wasn't married, I had no commitments. I would certainly like a woman, the woman herself would probably be happy to have my money. What was there to lose? Ah, but I was on unofficial AG business, what if there was some kind of scandal? I declined. I later learned that these ventures often ended up with the gringo in cactus country, drunk as snot and scared as shit as his new compadres casually fuck with him and take all his money and deposit him on the outskirts of town with a tale to tell. I will tell you this, prowling the office looking for numbers the next day, I saw the most beautiful women I have ever seen.
That was the high point. After that it went downhill. The guys I was cajoling, threatening, and sweet talking were laughing at me behind my back. Every now and then I was invited into Mars's office where he assured me that he knew I was doing a good job and wasn't interested in anything I had to say. I began to feel that I was being set up, that this whole thing was going to come crashing down and I was going to take the fall. That C Language course I spoke of earlier was beckoning, I bailed.
Later I realized that probably nobody gave a shit, The AG had been filing these bogus property reports for years, and maybe the people it was filed with didn't like it, but so what? Oh here's a little lesson in bureaucracy. To take care of the problem of people moving property around and getting it lost I developed a disk where they could blippety-blip type in the change then send us a printout and we would record the change and so nothing could get lost again. Neat huh? But even as I was perfecting my disk I realized that nobody was going to bother with that. But then hadn't I done all I could? Wasn't the fault all on them now? So see, I had solved the problem with a solution that would never work except that it would take the blame off me. I was well on the road to being a top-notch bureaucrat.
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