Michael Vasquez, The Miami Herald

July 29, 2008

Michael Vasquez
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: WAL*MART and who in the name of “all men should be brothers” are these two terrible people from Miami whom you highlight in your Page One story on the horror, the horror of a uniquely American institution thinking about expanding in Miami. I mean it’s not like it’s a toxic waste dump or a homeless AIDS shelter, is it?

Mr. Vasquez,

“Miami City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff
CRINGES
at the thought of ‘WAL*MART on the waterfront’.”

“Though it was Sarnoff’s aide, Peter Ehrlich, who described
the chain’s customers as ‘pickup truck’ drivers, Sarnoff
denies cultural elitism is motivating his opposition.”

“If we don’t want to out source our jobs, we should
a better job of ‘buying American’, Sarnoff said.”
The Miami Herald
Page 2A
Today
[The emphases are, of course, mine]

It’s like filling an inside straight. If you ever wonder why the guys who own casinos live in big houses and have huge diamond pinkie rings and women who look like they posed for Botticelli on their arms it’s because there are jemokes out there who think they can fill inside straights.

The thought of two men on the public payroll occupying the same offices and being so dumb, so mind numbing, so make my hair hurt, so make my finger nails curl backwards, so Homerically, so over the top, so jump the shark dumb that they couldn’t find their respective asses in a mirror lined phone booth using both hands with a certified Life Coach shouting instructions to them is kind of like…you know what I’m saying…like filling an inside straight. Twice. In a row.

Having listened to all – repeat – all of Mozart’s recorded works I am half way through it again. Since it’s summer time I am rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey. I am conversant with the 4 Source Theory of Penatateuch Composition. I am immune to “Balloon Juice”. I greatly admire Cicero, the man not the town. I had a payroll with 255 names on it. I know how to attack a two deep zone. My last gun fight was 15 years ago. I know what a 10K is because I used to sign them. I know my way around a carte des vins. I know the difference between Chiaroscuro and Caravaggio. I know why The Economic Consequences of Peace led to war. I have had issues decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. I was in the movie business. I have been 1500 feet down in a coal mine where the term ‘black hole’ is not racist. If you need some help with La Commedia or Ulysses [Joyce’s, not Tennyson’s] give me a call. I have prospected for gold. I was paid $5,000 to have lunch.

And to top it off, I have owned a red pickup truck since 1999. It has 118,000+ miles on it. The back window is too small for a gun rack that could hold my BAR, my favorite assault weapon.

May I add that if the Messrs Sarnoff and Ehrlich were on fire I wouldn’t pee on them to put out said conflagration. If you don’t believe me strike a match.

Accordingly, and in keeping with the protocol of my duties as the keeper of the laurels, I name Commissioner Sarnoff’s aide and butt boy Peter Ehrlich [Is there any chance that he is related to one of the 20th century’s great charlatans, Paul Ehrlich? That would explain a lot about him]

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK

Because he is higher up on the food chain and because he is the one who hired the above named and honored nit wit the Commissioner is named

POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH

The two saps can share them like rubber duckies.

The only good to have come of the rhetorical incontinence of these two is that they make the poltroons in Broward Count look not good but rather almost mediocre. Here, when any elected official is almost mediocre, a Te Deum is sung.

What else makes Commissioner Sarnoff cringe?

Let us imagine that he has a constituent, a woman of color, who is a single mom. Let us further imagine that she has a child in need of drugs. A short time ago she paid $55 a month. Now she pays $4 a month at WAL*MART. Does that make him cringe?

Let us imagine that she got her economic stimulus check of $300. Let us imagine that she is outside the normal banking system. She could use a check cashing company. They would charge her between $3 and $7 dollars to cash it. WAL*MART would cash it with neither a charge nor a condition attached to it. Does that make him cringe?

Does the prospect of indenturing Miami/Dade County with a one billion dollar – that’s $1,000,000,000 – yoke to build a stadium for a team that cannot fill the stadium they are in now make him cringe?

If it doesn’t it should.

Sap Ehrlich was obviously an Affirmative Action hire. Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer shouldn’t be an impediment to a life of public service. He filled the niche of “Hire the Handicapped”.

I say this because of what he said about “buying American”. That’s known as empirical evidence. It’s as real as your boot. That’s why I can say with 100% metaphysical certitude that the man is a dolt.

As the original Dr. J. said, “Such stupidity, sir, is not found in nature.”

I know he eschews public transit because that’s for the little people, the lumpenmenschen. When he puts gas into his car where does he think the oil came from? The South side of Chicago? Nantucket?

The coffee in the Double Grande Funnichio Organic Latte avec Merde that he drank this morning came from where? The shores of Lake Okeechobee? Coconut Grove? Lincoln Road?

Mr. Ehrlich, and what a sad sacked sorry ass he is, has a homework assignment. He has to find out what Mr. Hawley and Mr. Smoot did to the American economy by legislating “buying American”. I won’t spoil the joy of discovery - thinks of Keats “high on a hill in Darien” – for this neddy dunce. The image of a mucked up two car funeral leaps to mind.

Having spent this time gilding the lilies that these two bring to the marketplace I was struck by the fact that my archives has no record of finding both a

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK

&

POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH

in the same office and on the same day.

Accordingly, they have won the ultimate Trifecta. Indeed, Hercules would have to have done everything before cocktail time to have won this award.





They are both named

SMARMY BASTARDS OF THE YEAR

Such labors should give them a day of rest.

May I suggest that for the sake of the environment, for the benefit of drowning polar bears, for the noble goal of manatee suffrage they cut back on greenhouse gases?

Tell them to hold their breaths


PS – I made about 2 dozen literary, historical, cultural, and geographical references in my note to you. How many do you think Tweedledum and Tweedledee could indentify without causing GOOGLE to crash and burn?