We all recall the jokes we told each other back in the days of the wood-burning radios when it was sorta kinda tolerated to tell jokes about each other, like in the 1960s.
Some of the favored jokes in the suburban white boys’ tribe, which was full of kids who really never developed emotionally and intellectually past 8th grade, boys like me, were the jokes about the world’s thinnest books.
One could go the route of racial hatred if they liked, or the anti-gender route, or the losing teams in sports route, or one could pick on the kids at a particular school in which there was a perceived underlying social stigma.
These were the best of times and the worst of times, depending on one’s tribe.
Some of the books on the list included My Life’s Memories by Ronald Reagan and Things I Cannot Afford by Bill Gates, as well as such titles as Twenty Centuries of German Humor, Virginity in France and Italian War Heroes. This is an area of study in which bad taste is not just in heat; it is on fire.
The thinnest book in the world over the past 10 years or so is Courage in Congress.
Our Constitution is a game of rock, paper, scissors. The game is conducted so that no branch of government, executive, legislative and judiciary, is more powerful than another. We have checks and balances to keep things in position.
Over the past, oh, 50 years, one of the three branches stopped doing its damn job. It’s not the executive, and it’s not the judicial system. It’s Congress.
We know that tariffs suck. Congress sits there. We know that attacks on institutions of higher learning and the presence of international students in them are a form of economic subterfuge. Congress sleeps.
This is not a Trump thing, a Biden thing or a Putin thing. Or a Republican versus Democrat thing. This is a “Congress has lost its backbone” thing.
Yo, Judgment Day is more important than Election Day. Incumbents beware.
Craig Corsini lives and writes in San Rafael.
