By Beau Elliot
So we see that Donald Trump, soon to become the Tweet-in-Chief, if not the Trump-ahontas-in-Chief, has named Ben Carson to be head of HUD.
That would be the Department of Housing and Urban Development, if you’re not into abbreviating just about every word that comes down the pike and some that don’t.
(Some words come down the trout, which is why Richard Brautigan wrote Trout Fishing in America. It’s a classic about fishing. Or fishiness. Never enough fishiness, human history demonstrates.)
But it’s good that the Trumpster nominated Carson to head HUD. (If you don’t like abbreviations, you’re in the wrong era; this is not the time of glitzy hyper tech apps or, for that matter, sexting, it’s the era of abbreviations; people would abbreviate “a” if it didn’t mean the abbreviation would be longer than the letter. Which is rather beside the point of abbreviations.)
The Carson nomination is good, you say? Well, yeah. Carson is a physician, a man of science. It would be quite novel for Trumpster’s inner circle to have a touch of science.
Even a faint touch.
Because, of course, we know that Carson’s touch with science does indeed seem to be a wee faint. In the GOP primaries, a season to remember, he did opine that the Big Bang never happened because of the Law of Thermodynamics.
Um, yeah.
Real scientists jumped all over Carson, of course, because real scientists understand such small things as the Big Bang and thermodynamics. Because they have studied them.
But never fear. Carson is perfect for Housing and Urban Development because he has a never-before realized reason behind the ancient Egyptians’ building the pyramids: grain storage.
But of course. Why else would the ancient Egyptians have built these huge edifices with tiny, winding interiors that could hold perhaps two hours’ worth of grain if not to hold grain?
Talk about a grain of truth.
Perhaps, Carson as secretary of HUD, will pass his gaze over the public housing in America and decide that the buildings were too good for poor people, that those facilities would much better serve as storage for grain.
I mean, nobody eats poor people.
Yet.
Probably Carson will make a splendid Cabinet member. He fits right in, outside of not being an older white dude worth billions of dollars.
It’s rather humorous, in a Ionesco sort of way, that an old white guy worth billions will fill a Cabinet with other old white guys worth billions, and they’re somehow considered “populists.”
You know, they’re exactly like the rest of us.
I know, you’re laughing, too. What else is there to do? as the Irish say.
Well, Standing Rock just had something of a victory when the Army Corps of Engineers halted the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline because of environmental concerns.
“Put a price tag on what you value,” Iowa Public Radio says in its current fundraising drive.
No offense, Public Radio, which I value, but there is no price tag on what you value.
Standing Rock, and thousands of thousands of protests before it, have demonstrated that price tags have no meaning. People’s values do.
On the other hand, the Tweet-in-Chief, no doubt, will continue to tweet that you are meaningless. That’s what he’s good at, if nothing else.
It really is nothing else.