bizarreville

Once upon a time, there were 2 congressmen.  These fellows, at one time in their lives, were very smart people.  But the draining effect of serving many years, decades, in congress emptied all their intelligence juices into the congressional sewer, forcing them to act like mindless numbskulls.  Somehow these bozos continued to get re-elected, probably because their constituents were as dumb as they were.  So they muddled through their legislative jobs, showing up occasionally, and voting Aye or Nay on stuff, normally not paying much attention to what the stuff was.  Some pundits, evaluating their lacklusterness, called them gutless weiners.  This hurt their feelings, and they claimed that such a characterization was a distortion of the truth.

One gloomy day, the two were wandering aimlessly and found themselves on the brink of a fiscal cliff.  One congressman asked the other, “Do you think we should jump?”

“That’s a good question,” the second congressman replied.

“I wasn’t really asking you to give me a letter grade on the quality of the question, sir,” the first responded.  “I was asking for your position statement.”

“I’m standing.  Right here, next to you.  Can’t you see that?  I know you have eye problems, but this is ridiculous.”

Both congressmen, in fact, had serious eyesight problems.  Neither could see much beyond his own nose.  But the first man confidently spoke that there was a pond at the bottom of the fiscal cliff that would break their fall and prevent serious injury.  He said that he thought they should go for it.

The second congressman hesitated.  He gazed across the narrow plateau, and noticed another fiscal cliff on the other side.  They both walked over, and saw what appeared to be a very deep, catastrophic drop-off into a pile of craggy impailing rocks.  “Why don’t we jump off this fiscal cliff instead?  We would get a lot less wet.  My wife gets so upset when I come home with soaking wet clothes.”

“But it’s about 10 times as big a drop.  We could get seriously skewered on those rocks at the bottom.”

“But it would take longer for it to happen.  I bet it would take almost a minute before we were shish-kabobed.  Over there on your cliff…you would get totally soaked within 3 seconds.”

“Yeah, you’re right.  I wasn’t thinking.  You know it’s really great when we work together in a bi-partisan way to solve a tough problem.  We learn so much when we work together.”

They hugged each other, and took a flying leap.  It took 43 seconds for them to get bludgeoned, far short of the one-minute prediction.  A mountain climber who witnessed the leap said they seemed happy and excited most of the way down.  He said one yelled “Cowabunga” at about the halfway point, but the other fellow yelled something that sounded like the F-word.  He was not sure if that was a positive kind of F, or a negative F…probably the latter.

Back at the Hall of Congress, the fellow congressmen of their 2 fallen comrades commended them for their bravery, and passed a resolution that history should not regard them as gutless weiners.  One freshman congressman asked why they felt the need to jump at all?  But he was pulled aside and reprimanded by a senior legislator for his lack of sensitivity in this moment of grief.

Disclaimer:  all stories in Bizarreville are fiction.  Are you surprised?

When the President instructed all citizens to jump off the Fiscal Cliff, Johnnie was reluctant.  He had been a staunch supporter of the Chief Exec, even voted for him in the November election.  He particularly liked the way the President said he was going to go after those nasty rich guys who had good jobs but were not paying their fair share of taxes.  Johnnie knew that those guys were going to have to jump off an even bigger, steeper cliff.  And, well, it served them right for being so damn greedy.  But as Johnnie approached the precipice, he began to wonder…began to question this brand of leadership:  trust me, I’ve got your back.  Johnnie looked around and did not see anyone with a life line that would take care of his back, his front, or any other body part for that matter.

Johnnie had been watching the TV news.  His favorite station, Channel 7 Marxwitness News, had interviewed a left-leaning senator who confidently explained that it was not really a fiscal “cliff”, more of a fiscal playground slide.  “Well then why do they call it a cliff, if it’s only a slide” he thought.  “And why, when I look down this fall-off does it look like I will need an EMT squad when I hit bottom?”

He inched forward, loosening a few pebbles that tumbled down the cliff…bouncing along on the jagged rocks until they finally launched themselves for uninterrupted treks to the bottom.  Is that how he would tumble…carom off a few rocks, causing some minor bruises and lacerations before being pushed away from the rocky surface for the bullet train to the bottom?  Or would he snowball down the cliff, painfully tumbling round and round like some Hanna Barbera cartoon character?

Johnnie backed away for a minute.  He began to wonder why it was necessary that he jump off the cliff.  After all, he had done nothing wrong, nothing unscrupulous.  Well, there was that one time that he padded his expense account on that training trip…but he would gladly refund the $3.50 now to avoid this calamity.  His neighbor Fred was a lot more unscrupulous.  Fred even lied on his resume about that time he got canned…said it was his own decision to leave the company.  Baaah, he was drop-kicked like a worn-out rugby ball.  He ought to be jumping off the cliffs of Dover.

Then he remembered the President’s speech last week, explaining how jumping was everyone’s patriotic duty.  Johnnie, if nothing else, was certainly a patriot.  He knew he could never go back into town and have everyone accuse him of being an unpatriotic piece of chicken crap.  It would be a life of shame, hiding from ridicule and finger-pointing of fellow citizens…turning away from the whispers and head shakes from friends who thought they knew him better…being uninvited to Thanksgiving football watching by embarrassed family members.  Being called a Jumpless Wonder.  No, that would never do.

Johnnie looked down the face of the cliff one more time.  Hey, he thought… he might just get a little banged-up, but come out surviving.  He could buy himself a tee-shirt proudly saying “I survived the Fiscal Cliff jump”.  He could wear that shirt to Thanksgiving Day football next year.

He gulped hard, inched a little bit forward…a little more…a teensy bit more.  Then the alarm went off.