Anyway, I'd retired from the Congress, been to Branson, even helped bury Al Goethals by the time of that accident at the Helium Reserve, so I can honestly say it didn't happen on my shift... nothing to do with it... which is, of course, a politician's polite way of evading responsibility. Of course I was responsible... I voted out two budgets that kept the damn thing going as a courtesy to a colleague in Texas, whose own vote I needed on behalf of the local boys at Lexmark... for which they downsized near a thousand constituents and should be called "Mexmark", now... anyway, half of Amarillo floated off before those FEMA people came in and tied it down.

Helium's not so bad as some... doesn't explode, doesn't combine with other gases to make fumes that'll burn out eyes and lungs. Just makes things rise up and people start talking like Donald Ducks... forever, if you get too big a dose, as those visiting Generals down in Amarillo found out. So Congress had to pension off a couple dozen floaty, Donald Duck-talky four-stars and brigadiers before their time... what with the Costa Rica and such, it's pretty hard to take orders to march into a jungle, and maybe get shot, on the say-so of any General as talks like Donald Duck.

The Federal Helium Reserve's just one of thousands of Congressional pork projects, most of which do at least have some use in that they keep people in districts at work and children fed. Pork's also a grand source of campaign contributions, which is why reformers say it's so hard to turn incumbents out of office. One Washington journalist, name of Elizabeth Drew, playing Nancy Drew before the election of double-ought, found so much money washing round there that she said it was drowning out all decency such a remained in politics, and "threatening the underpinnings" of democracy itself.

The reason this happens is our two institutional parties, as so pretend to despise one another, determined, long ago, to carve the taxpayers' pig up between the both of them.

Your right-sliced pork used to get divvied up between subsidies for corporate billionaires and military contractors but, of late, more and more of this has been diverted into what might be called the PIC, or prison-industrial complex.

Since we've all but halted making things for sale and educating young people to finance the building of jails you have to find criminals first, or make them, meaning sharing revenues with police to catch 'em in the act. So that fellow in the White House now, being spooked by the nine-eleven, paid off his friends in the police unions with nearly a quarter billion in givebacks to the states and cities to put the hundred thousand more cops on the streets Slick Willy promised but failed to deliver. Of course he had to tinker with Clinton's deficit arithmetic and throw out the Head Start to make it fly but, hey!, look at this as ensuring we'll not have any shortage of illiterate, unemployable raw material from which to make the criminals which all these police will get to chase and all the corrections people get to lock up.

In California, where lock-em-up's flourished under both political parties, there were about forty thousand inmates, watched over by four thousand guards and such back in '80. A dozen years later, when there were over a hundred thousand cons, the ranks of correctional officers, parole agents and such was up to twenty two thousand. And, just last year, when the prison population topped a quarter million, we had seventy three thousand uniformed, unionized screws there... still only a quarter as many as in the teachers' unions, but they spent four times as much in political contributions in ought-two.

When I was in Congress I used to ask shouldn't we at least let the system keep up with itself by hiring a few more judges so as to process all of this "chow"... which is, what I believe, Tom Wolfe called human fiber, moving through the colon, then out the bowels of justice... and the answer I got was mostly the same, whether from the Democrat or the Republican side of the House. "We've got so many mandatory minimums locked in that you don't really need judges anymore," a colleague was pleased to point out to me, also admitting that the need to present a facade of partisanship makes most confirmations impossible, less'n George III really twists arms (as after that follower after Pat Robertson killed off them two Supremes). I guess we could turn the Federal process over to computers, the way they've done with a few counties in Wisconsin and Washington State.

It's gotten so that the PIC's begun stealing swill from the trough of our longtime right-wing alpha-pork potentate, the Pentagon. Since World War Two ended, the military monarchy's had pretty much its own claim on Washington's right-sliced pork. Forty years after the Navy had one admiral for every two ships, as opposed to one per 130 when the shooting stopped. The Air Force had one general per 21 airplanes, as opposed to one per 244 in 1945. In fact, the backlash impacted on prison-building so much that, up in Lexington, the Governor kicked a few hundred felons out before their time was up... wherefore came all those murdered kids and nuns.

And where old fashioned complexes had military meeting industrial was in all the transfer between retired brass and the contractors, which used to have the result of both of 'em ganging up on Washington until PIC muscled in on MIC. Not that they'd come after us with riding crops, no... the likes of Rockwell and General DynElectric (GDE, after the merger last April) and Martin Marietta come with plenty of paper bags of cash to keep negotiations friendly while they help us grease the screwing of the public. Only the wild-eyed few resist, one of them a Republican from Iowa, of all places, Charlie Grassley, who'd ask questions like what's a "multidirectional, inertially enhanced impact generator" we'd be paying $435 a pop for, and back in the Senior Bush administration, when a dollar was worth something, (even though signed by Secretary of Treasury Cat Villalpondo, who was to get sent up for three felonies). Finally someone 'fessed up to Grassley that the damn thing was a hammer.

Now liberals are known to enjoy pork too... might call it by a politically correct moniker (free range bacon or such), but it still has a curly tail, mean little eyes, and rolls round in mud. Liberal pork mostly feeds social workers, as who sweep into town like crows gathering around fresh, unkosher roadkill whenever a factory or hospital closes. Used to get lots of vulturenomics in Detroit, Toledo, Pittsburgh... retraining steelworkers and auto assemblers as hairdressers, burger flippers and telemarketers, usually at half what they used to make, often less. Social workers in Buffalo dunned taxpayers more than three thousand a head for such servicing; makes one wonder why they just didn't give the money straight off to the workers so they could keep their cars and houses and go out and find minimum wage jobs on their own. Now that America's wised up to the dot commies, look for the rust belt to spread out east to Boston, south to Austin and west to San Francisco and Seattle, places liberals naturally congregate in anyway. Sooner than later, someone will to propose giving grants to retrain the silicon surplus to sew minichips into microskirts or the other way round!

(The inevitable laid-off biotechies of a few years hence will, at least, have the means to scratch out a living, brewing up monsters and diseases in the garages!)

If religion's the shovel with which Entropians of the conservative persuasion whack people in the back of their heads with n' bury them with after they've fallen into graves dug out by themselves, social work's the stiletto that such as remains of liberalism slips between your ribs.

Footsteps on a moonless night in old Venice or Florence, maybe, an upwards explosion of pigeons from cobblestones... a horrid stench of putrefaction, the briefest instant's glimpse of a cruel, plague-ravaged face beneath a Carnival mask, and then... Eternity!

And an unpleasant one at that... laden with lines, and forms to fill out in the antechambers of Inferno.

When my boys were five and six, and exorbitantly fond of ghost stories the Senator used to send them into shivers by retelling this tale of the haints over Terpenning's Ridge, a ways east. One of those, it's said, got kil't by Andy Jackson in some damn duel, my Pa went into detail about the oozings round his head, and the flies. Just a while before he passed on, the Senator also got most of his mountains, all the way to the Virginia line, included in this Federal Enterprise Zone, to the tune of sixty mil in tax breaks and outright grants for getting small business started where the floor had dropped out of steel and coal. It was distinctive - most of the money went out to places like Atlanta, Detroit and New York (though Louisville got its share) so some of the water projects even got the Parnell name in memorium (afore the Germans took over in Mexington... I mean, Lexington). After a while, though... and once the hill dogs started scrapping with valley dogs over that EZ money, as it's called... some men from way out by Hazard dropped into Washington, said it would've been just as well they'd never been selected.

I've heard this happened in other places too. "After a while," said lawyer Yvonne Haskins, as wrote up the papers for Camden, New Jersey's EZ, "we saw plans being changed and groups fighting over the dollars and nothing getting done. I had to wash my hands of it."

Now I'm not saying our bureaucracies are that much more corrupt or incompetent than any as flourished since the royal courts of Europe in Dick Whittington's day, or among certain Asian dynasties, where dragon ladies and eunuchs and Emperors with six foot long fingernails oppressed the toiling masses. We've had 'em ourselves, and for more than a century.

Ideally, bureaucracy rises to combat the sort of cruelty overclasses wield on those beneath them, just because they can. Thank the Smithfield and Tyson people, if you will, for the expanse of OSHA... after they refused to let workers go to the outhouses, just to keep them in their place, so many began crapping themselves and the wings and chitlins people eat, it had to become a matter for the bureaucracies. Marc Linder, this Iowa law professor, even wrote an effin' book on employers as feed their macho by making employees crap themselves, calling it... and I kid you not... "Void Where Prohibited". The problem, Linder says, is "much more widespread than we had originally believed."

Even capitalism's great apologist, Adam Smith, remarked on the tendencies for his "men of system..." as "cannot suffer the slightest deviation" to obsessively arrange people like pawns on a chessboard and so usurp the Invisible Hand, as it reaches for a sheet of Charmin'.

And bureaucrats used to have a code of conduct. Back in 1905, a Tammany boss by name of George Washington Plunkitt even spelled out the difference between what he called "honest and dishonest graft"... explaining, as to the former: "I seen my opportunities, and I took 'em!" And much of what passed for bureaucracy during the New Deal after the Depression turned out pretty well: state highways and bridges, parks and murals. Of course plenty took their opportunities therein, and 'Publicans harped on lazy loafers as slept on their shovels but... take a look in any Almanac of election results in the thirties... people didn't think much of the elephant men in those days.

Some programs in the New Frontier and the Great Society as followed weren't quite as useful, more afterwards... the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac honeypots come to mind... became not at all useful. Presidents since Nixon don't even bother giving names to great bureaucratic leaps forward - probably for the better, as the intent of law seems to have swerved from keeping families fed and sheltered to vexing the rapidly dwindling population of productive Americans with insane and mean-spirited legislation.

The city fathers in Sandusky, Ohio... as not occupied chasing their Strangler round... arrest wheelchair users who have to use the streets because the sidewalks are inaccessible. Down 'round St. Petersburg, people who paint houses or mow lawns on Sunday get busted... up in Charlotte, they'll toss you in the jug if your grass is cut either higher or lower than the limits some bureaucrat found time to get passed into law. Small Business Association termites as swell the coffers of minority figurehead-fronted corporations and caused that black boycott in Miami... the Agriculture Department wasting millions revising and re-revising the mandatory diameter of holes in American made cheese whose makers are already fighting in The Hague to allow their product to still be called "Swiss"...

And, all over, well-intentioned Feds bringing back old "Negro removal" redevelopment schemes with a new name, HOPE, in tribute to that man therefrom... dynamiting slums and projects after removing the tenants and then discovering the money set aside for replacement to be not there. So we got the poor out of their slums... onto the streets and, inevitably, off to jail, which is where the liberal social work and right wing prison-industrial-complex porkers touch pinky fingers, giggling like Teletubbies at the distillery tour.

Did hear of one bureaucrat as tried to do right, to be fair, this Edward Jaworski who drove a suicidal... maybe homicidal... mental patient back to LA to be with his mother. Obviously he violated the code that left-sliced pork has to be all fat, no sauerkraut, since he was fired for becoming "too involved in the lives of his clients."

The social work establishment's fed itself nicely over the last three decades, while producing damn little of lasting benefit, either in the public or private sectors... so what does it call its own reason for being? (Besides inspiring so many shoot-'em-ups as to create so many security jobs that some offices as have only one, maybe two clerks to handle hundreds of clients, have at least five pistol-packin' guards!)

Well, a body must admit as to how the liberal termites have succeed in ramming a whole swarm of politically correct inanities down America's throat... everything from banning Christmas decorations at City Hall to sending themselves on fine junkets to Disney World, like those hundreds of park rangers who got a taxpayer-funded, week long seminar where they got to hear lectures on the Freudian implications of teenagers in Mickey Mouse costumes, practicing "Safe History" in the guided tours, joint venturing with McDonalds and learning to lead their unfortunate clientele... the public, as goes into parks to experience the grandeur of nature... in Goofy Nature Songs.

I'm not certain whether those were the rangers as burned most of the state of New Mexico a while after, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they had!

Finally, of course, comes the ever-lovin' NEA... not the teachers' union, which has its own problems, but arts people, as are always smearing elephant dung somewhere, or taking baths in chocolate. I have it on his own authority that the philosopher Socrates proposed that intellectuals be fed out of the public trough in Athens, becoming the prototype for NEA bureaucrats. (For which liberality with the public's drachma, he justly deserved his free bowl of gumment hemlock!)

One of the Senator's favorite abominations, approved a few years before he passed on, was a four hundred thousand grant to J. Evan Lighter, a university hustler down in Knoxville, for a 1006 page Dictionary of American Slang, to be marketed by Random House (a private, profit-making bidness, now owned by Germans) at fifty bucks a pop.. This, as I look through it, consists mostly of cuss words that have gone out of fashion for one reason or another... probably as most who used them got shot or knifed for the offense given.

Were I in Congress then, I'd have suggested... as a means of uniting left and right wings of the dodo bird... that every admiral or general given command of expensive boats and planes as keep breaking down be given a hardbound copy of Perfessor Lighter's dictionary in place of "multidirectional, inertially enhanced impact generators" to pound nails with. We'd save almost four hundred each... and the grunts n' gobs would have access to plenty of old, elegant cusswords if they happened to hit a finger.

Now American pork chops, right cut or left, at least have the benefit of benefiting Americans... we also have the sort which, near as I can figure it, derive from somebody's wish to play Santa Claus. I mean the sack o'goodies dispensed to foreigners through a holy host of termite agencies like the World Bank, IMF, Export-Import and such... those as who never met a foreign psychopathic dictator they didn't like who wasn't already being funded by the UN under the "Monterrey Consensus" of ought-three. You have money pried from American taxpayers going off everywhere from Argentina to Zaire and causing fearful violent competition between the colonels, ministers and foreign mobsters as those from Colombia, or Hong Kong dragons... even the Russian mafia... now led by this dude Kapusta who translates, the FBI lets me know, as "The Cabbage".

Why not! Our own organized crime's rakin' in big cabbage side orders to the gumment pork... bailed-out savings and loans, tobacco subsidies, breaking up predatory but stable monopolies like Microsoft and the phone company so as to brew the sort of confusion and chaos as some cities had when crack gangs started moving the kat.

Hate to kick Newtrous when he's down and out and making ends meet at the community college but, after all, he did say our inner city problems could be wished away reformatting violent street gangs as, if you believe it, telemarketers! Really all we need at dinnertime: phone ringing... yo man! this be 82nd Street Crips, got home protection offer you can't refuse, mo'fo!

Exported pork as ain't criminal is, more often, simply strange... like this World Health Organization endeavor to drench Borneo with DDT, illegal over here, so to kill off its bugs. The bugs went on living, though WHO's pesticides did kill off lizards, which ate them, then all the island's cats, which snacked on lizards. As a result, millions of plague-bearing rats descended on villages and, according to Tim Redmond and Marc Mowrey's book "Not In Our Back Yard", the United States "had to help parachute in new cats to control the vermin."

Now, as even William F. Buckley was forced to ask: "Whom do you blame for the people's immaturity?" we face a long look through dirty mirrors to differentiate our donkey boys and elephant men from out in Russia, where Kapusta and the mob at least perform such functions gumment and legal business can't get right... like smuggling cigarettes, women's underwear, X-rated DVDs and pharmeceuticals (sometimes as actually are as represented!).

Could we stop America's porking-up? We're not as far gone as India, yet, but, as the need for people as do productive work shrinks and shrinks, bureaucracy has to be acknowledged its place in the scheme of things, slightly below pulling rickshaws, slightly above looting and cannibalism.

Bad as things are for American workers, the system would absolutely break down were it not for the millions employed - at variant degrees of gainfulness - in bureaucracies of both private and public sorts. Their cabbage, remember, further supports legions of burger-flippers, QualMart clerks, little Chinese girls sewing socks and the snakeheads as stand over them, stockbrokers, landlords and bankers.

Millions... with no other recourse than selling chiclets in the street. Spies and paper-pushers, statisticians, social workers and lawyers.

I'd start dismantling bureaucracy, but slowly! And, of course, discriminatingly. At least until the various users and abusers in the private sector are deterred or detoured away from their depravities by real sanctions, like jail terms.

Have to find some chow to keep the PIC going!

So join the CNC, folks, and vote for candidates as we run or, at the least, endorse. Long as donkey boys and elephant men slice the pork, heap on the cabbage, too, I'd recommend investing in Perfessor Ev's cuss-dictionary for a few choice phrases, as best explain such situation as finds us floating away on the gumment helium, and without parachutes, or pussies, either!