Mhall46184@aol.com
“Hey, Guys, Hold My Texas A & M Diploma and Watch This!”
A Georgetown, Virginia branch of the D.C. Public Library has closed temporarily due to an infestation of snakes.
Well, hey, Washington, right?
The snake allusion is obvious; the surprise here is that the citizens of Georgetown occasionally read at all, taking a little literary time off from power golf, power tennis, power lunches, and power schmoozing with mysterious foreign powers.
One imagines The Honorable Maxine Waters curling up with John Milton’s Paradise Lost after a full day of inciting riots. Or maybe just curling up and hissing (Book X, line 508).
With snakes on a shelf President Clinton is not yet able to turn in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Alexandria (not Alexandra) Ocasio Hyphen Cortez is reputed to know what a book is.
President Trump checked out How to Win Friends and Influence People, and concluded that he had written better books than that.
F.B.I. agents wiretap the audio books instead of taking them home, the C.I.A. spookies investigate Goodnight, Moon (one of Prime Minister Trudeau’s favs) for coded messages from Iraq, the superannuated Secret Service frat boys study all the books about how to throw good parties, and Congress investigates the librarians, threatening them with prison if they don’t admit under oath that they have read Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Yevtushenko.
We continue our reptilian theme near Beaumont, Texas, where a young woman had herself photographed in her Texas A & M graduation costumery while posing with an alligator said to be fourteen feet long.
Some have suggested that A & M is at fault for not teaching students that alligators eat pets, children, and the occasional adult, including vegetarians and Aggies.
Reptiles are all fun and games until someone gets eaten, okay?
But, really, teaching children about dangerous animals should happen at home. A reality is that lots of children no longer learn ordinary human behaviors at home. Even if they have a home. The authority figure cooking meth doesn’t get around to cooking for the children. Kiddie-garten and first-grade teachers must teach many of their charges about when and where to poo-poo and wee-wee, washing one’s hands, eating with utensils, and all the other usages that help distinguish (not always successfully) humans from reptiles.
Snakes get to skip the lesson on washing hands.
Even so, the Board of This and That who constitute the governing body of Texas A & M probably never considered as a topic for fish camp the basic mummy-doesn’t-want-you-to-be-popped-into-a-pie-by-Mr.-McGregor idea that fooling around with a fourteen-foot alligator is unwise.
To paraphrase an old wheeze, the joke is now “Hey, guys, hold my Texas A & M diploma and watch this!”
-30-
