March 17, 2013
Michael Mayo
The Sun Sentinel

RE: My quest for God’s amazing grace in the sacred/holy season of Lent has overridden my desire to poleaxe you for knowing less than nothing about the Constitution as you plainly and proudly state in today’s unlinkable column in the Sun Sentinel.

Mr. Mayo,

It would be unChristian of me, particularly this close to Holy Week, to say you were dumb so I won’t. It is not the same as being the smartest bear in in the zoo or the world’s tallest midget, particularly since I have long regarded you as being one of the smarter citizens of the nether world on modern American Liberalism, but there’s just so much that you don’t know.

You wield your well documented Progressive cudgels for one Chris Brennan who, until recently, was a helmsman for the Fort Lauderdale Water Taxi Company. The reason he was canned was because of a tree growing in Fort Lauderdale. He publicly proclaimed that it should be spared the woodman’s axe.

The problem is that his employer, the Water Taxi Company, is a tenant of the man who wants to cut the tree down.

I quickly add that I am very much in favor of cutting down trees. My reasons are simple: I love the sounds that cellos make. I like baseball bats because they make unique thunk sound when they hit a pitched baseball. I am still trying to master chop sticks. I am never far from my emergency tooth picks. Strangely enough I sometimes get a chill running up my leg when I touch a newspaper.

Brennan’s boss acted in what he decided was his rational self-interest. He fired him. People forget that you really shouldn’t poke the sleeping dog in the eye.

You say it was an “outrage”.

Would you have said it was an “outrage” if he had been fired for saying that abortions should be outlawed?

Would you have said it was an “outrage” if he had been fired for calling for fewer, not more, gun control laws?

Would you have said it was an “outrage” if he had been fired for trying to solicit recruits for a NAMBLA [North American Man Boy Love Association] sleepover?

Did you say it was an “outrage” when Rush Limbaugh was blackballed out of buying a piece of a NFL franchise?

Antigone spoke up while Thomas More was silent. Both were willing to accept the consequences of their actions. Indeed, they, by calling attention to themselves, insisted on their punishment. Why should Brennan be different? Why should you think it an “outrage”? I daresay your “outrages” are eclectically chosen. All “outrages” are equal; some “outrages” are more equal than others. It is easy to go into high dudgeon mode when your favorite color is plaid.

Here comes the hard part.

The First Amendment begins with the majestic words “Congress shall make no law”.

It doesn’t say the “Water Taxi Company shall make no law”.

It absolutely doesn’t say the “Sun Sentinel shall make no law”.

When was the last time you had a columnist, not an op-ed contributor, who said that Affirmative Action was wrong on all levels, that the Minimum Wage laws were the most anti-Black Federal laws passed in the 20th century, that standing in a long line to vote – I stood in line for 1 hour and 47 minutes, on 3 titanium joints I add, November last – is not prima facie proof of racism, that taxing your way to prosperity is as easy as standing in a pail and picking yourself up by the handle, that all the best intentioned public policies, particularly the ones that have never worked, will still leave the horizon beyond both our reach and our grasp?

I think never is the only acceptable answer. In fact, it is the only possible answer.

Would you be “outraged” if I were to call that an “outraqe”?

Don’t worry. I won’t. If I were to I would have to call the next hurricane an “outrage”.






KEVIN SMITH
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET