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?