This diary entry, arriving on the heels of a silence enjoined by the hereafter mentioned vow of ignorant indifference, was occasioned by an urgent telephone call from a representative of my longtime publisher, Smallwood & Heep (principal offices in Bournemouth, Dorset). I was at first impervious to his entreaties that I resume my literary and cultural endeavors, and resolved not to be prevailed upon in my unwillingness to resume my satirical lucubrations.
He persisted, I began to relent; he threatened, I bristled; he cajoled, I was touched; he flattered, my vanity was touched. He offered no promise of emolument but urged that I had left a public bereft. I scoffed, he mentioned my 'page hits'. I agreed then, but only to this, that I would attempt a modest diary, some daily record of reflections, bonn motts and what-have-you's calculated to puzzle and stun the most ingenious of our race.
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Awoke late to another day of abominable soul-destroying weather, snow and sky of a uniform and depressing gray, a textbook spring day in the Rockies. As I was taking a second coffee my neighbor Zeno knocked, brimful of geriatric urgency which spilled through the front door with a gust of snow, all to inform me that my meager livelihood was further imperiled by the unprincipled caddishness of the bodies politic of Kansas and Oklahoma.
In a word, the legislative bodies of these cultural outposts have proposed legislation to curtail the development of wind energy in their precincts. In the case of Kansas, the state's current legal requirement that energy providers include a mandated percentage of renewable options in their commercial portfolios is under the gun; Oklahoma is anxious to preserve its dubious scenic beauty by a moratorium on wind farms east of an arbitrary line along the Interstate 35 corridor, damning their brothers and sisters in the west to the unsightly if lucrative prospect of wind turbines along the endless brown horizon.
It can't be a coincidence that the statesmen and women of these two provinces are in the backyard of Koch Industries' Wichita offices, where the brothers Koch are known to do a brisk trade in gas and oil, fertilizers, commodities, and a sizeable stable of hacks in statehouses and congressional seats.
Having lately taken a monkish vow of indifferent ignorance, I was loathe to be reminded again of a world at large. Zeno's news sent me into a brown study, an unsatisfactory reverie on the nature of America's best and brightest. A professional politician, being readily available for purchase, is most often likened to a sex worker - unfairly in my judgment, since the only thing you can buy from a sex worker is his or her services, and a sex worker's success and reputation relies on giving professional satisfaction through the mastery of certain tangible and defined techniques. But a politician can be purchased whole and entire, body and soul. A sex worker's motivations might plausibly be some mixture of both commerce and philanthropy, but the motive energies of a politician are unvaryingly singular and pure. What passes for a democratic election these days is little more than a Craigslist complete with 'pics'. For the convenience of your further engagement in the processes of democracy, they all have a Paypal account.
Democracy at Work
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