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April 11, 2011

BLESSED ARE THE JOKERS

A friend on Facebook shared a recent Jon Stewart comedy skit about some of the things the newly elected Republican Governors have been saying recently. Given my working class background and my years in the Labor Movement, when I listen to them speak to the detriment of the poor, the elderly and the medically needy, I truly feel I have stepped “Through the Looking Glass.” When the Jabberwocky makes more sense than politicians one can either cry or laugh. Thanks to Stewart, one is apt to do the latter.  

Of all the hypocritical and contradictory statements Stewart exposes in his three minute monologue, none is more comic than those of Ohio’s governor John Kasich.  He attacks public employees for being paid better than private sector workers but justifies paying a staff member $170,000 because, “it’s difficult to attract people from the private sector to work for public sector wages.” Go figure.

If Kasich had remembered his study of Walt Whitman from his high school English class, he might have put a literate gloss on his absurdity:

                                “Do I contradict myself?

                                Very well, then, I contradict myself,

                                I am large – I contain multitudes.”

(“Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman)

Maybe he’d skipped class that day.