THE PRICE OF PIZZA IS ETERNAL VIGILANCE

As promised/threatened,here's today's long piece. Suitable for reading at a relaxed pace, in the wake of your alt-poultry orgy.

THE PRICE OF PIZZA IS ETERNAL VIGILANCE

A few nights ago, something really odd happened.
  After a wearying day (long story), I called to order pizza. Then, after they put me on hold for about 3/4 of "Sultans of Swing," they hung up on me.
  I took it in stride. These things happen. I  called back, was cordially put back on hold again, this time by two employees talking over each other, and I waited through 2/3 of "Year of the Cat." I was just thinking about posting on Twitter, "more like Decade of the Cat, am I right?", when they hung up on me again. Rough night, apparently, at Pizza Clown.
  Now I had to get in my car and just drive to the damn place. I gave my son a piece of toffee to tide him over in my absence (I came to regret that later, but let's not get distracted).
I got in my car, only to be reminded helpfully that my tank was on "E." So now I had to drive to the gas station first before driving to the pizza place.
  So I did that. And I'm filling up my car, and I look down and realize I'm standing in a big puddle of gas. The last motorist at that pump must have been doing some sort of jig during what would normally be a more static procedure. Fortunately I was wearing my worn-out shoes with the holes in the soles, so ruining them further was no tragedy.
  Eventually, I got to the pizza place. The phone never stopped ringing the entire time I was there, as if it were a pizza command center during a pepperoni crisis. The franchise owner (I'm basing this assumption on his gray hair and pained expression) was only able to speak to me about four words at a time, between asking people to please hold, and cuing up  "American Pie" for them to listen to while he took my order in nine separate installments. This process may sound complicated, but I haven't even told you yet that the menu I'd used to put my order together at home was apparently now outdated. I picked up the menu by the counter, and thinking on my feet at this point, placed a slightly recalibrated order since several of the items on my carryout menu were no longer available. After he took a break from our long and winding chat to put another three more unwitting victims on hold, he explained that several other items were also unavailable. I now had to get my mind around the disturbing fact that even the updated menu had suddenly gone out of date, during the time I'd been standing there.
"We don't have chicken sausage anymore," he gravely intoned, lamenting that Corporate Headquarters had made this decision about chicken sausage despite the great affection his local customers had shown for it. "Ah," I said brilliantly, and he began selling me on the idea of something called "fennel sausage." It was pork, he revealed, but when I inquired whether fennel tasted like licorice, as I dimly and perhaps wrongly recalled from a former life, several of the employees standing behind their boss shook their heads from side to side in a pantomime effort to convince me to For The Love Of God Stop Asking Questions About Fennel. Against all odds, I got through placing my order, and I was given a complimentary empty cup. It was but a few pleasant steps to the soft drink dispensing machine, where I encountered a series of fountain soda options, along with a series of handwritten notes that essentially indicated they were out of every flavor except Diet Dr. Pepper. I was going to take a photo to document this, because I didn't think anyone would believe me about this part of the story, but it quickly became clear to me that I could only photograph this tableau using "landscape" and that almost never works out for me.
  Skipping past a less vigorous part of my narrative, where I sipped my grandly named soda at a leisurely pace while watching the next customer drop ten dollars in nickels all over the floor (not as much fun as it sounds), I started reading an article in the New Yorker. That's the kind of thing we big city elites do with our phones as we await our fennel sausage pizza, and our three individual orders of eight wings apiece ("because the new register won't allow me to ring up an order of twenty-four").
  I didn't really feel like reading this article, about Obama's state of mind in the wake of the recent election (from about a week ago, if you recall), but an increasingly panicky search of my windbreaker pockets led to the inescapable conclusion that I'd left my ear buds on my dresser at home, just before setting off on this epic journey. "Jesus, I bet Odysseus wouldn't have made that stupid mistake," I said to myself, in yet another ostentatious display of my elite education. (Actually, most of what I know about Greek epics comes from Ray Harryhausen films, but for the sake of my running gag can you just play along?)
  So the rhythm and blues music I'm in the midst of studying isn't accessible right now (the squalidly lyrical tenor sax career of New Orleans legend Lee Allen is this week's focus, if you must know), and so I'm reading the article, and it's really awfully depressing. It's about how Obama's whole eight years now seems like an unconscionable waste, sacrificed on the secular altar of the Republican Party's eagerness to treat public policy as a kind of Harvard/Yale football game, where they enjoy a sumptuous banquet while the rest of us poor suckers are starving without a seat in the stadium. Is our government to serve the Republican Party, who seem to have taken possession of the ball for much of the game, and reward them for pretending they stood for anything other than being opposed to the man who insisted on sitting day in and day out at an Oval Office desk, in spite of the fact that, by their reckoning, the country didn't really want him there. They made it impossible for him to accomplish anything except on party line vote, which was rarely possible because apparently the Democrats are rarely united over the quotidian specifics of what policy should be, but easily distinguishable from the Republicans, who are always thoroughly in agreement about what it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be allowed to exist in the world. So Obama's options were to do nothing, in which case presumably he'd be pilloried for his arrogant habit of doing nothing, or the other option of working like a dog to get Dems to hammer out an agreement on things they don't always agree upon, and then turning over the floor to the sniffing of the loyal opposition, hurt and dejected because they weren't allowed to scuttle everything. Had they not made it crystal clear to us that their party didn't want any of Obama's ideas to happen? An oddly grim and tight lipped position to take, it would seem, for a party that had recently done their level best to put the nicest face possible on a war that made no sense at all and was conducted appallingly every step of the way, with the kind of naïveté that holds as an article of faith the childish idea that we could know another country without really looking at them, and without knowing its people enough to tell one faction from another, and forgetting that people that represent factions don't even think of themselves as factions, because just as we do here in the USA, they all just believe their group is the one true people, and furthermore cheerily believing we could safely assume one thing or another about how they would react to us going over there and killing the Wicked Witch of the East. And the scenery would all turn from black and white to color, and we'd be welcomed like Navy boys to a luau in a John Wayne film. Or, scratch that, in an Elvis film. And on to the end of Bush's embarrassing logic-free term, where cognitive dissonance reigned. In my no doubt prejudiced framing of this recent history, I don't seem to recall that Democrats fought Bush tooth and nail on all of it, and I certainly don't recall them acting indignant even when they were forced, annoyingly, to stand up straight and cripple the president on something. And cripple his presidency they did not. The jury wasn't even out long enough to get sandwiches before the Democrats rubber-stamped that war whose dumbness and immorality were joined at the hip in genial competition, like Hope and Crosby in some road picture (one of the ones where they were wearing burnooses, that's all I remember).
  So at the end of a carnival ride that got stuck about three quarters of the way through, with the scary mummy popping out at us over and over, til it was boring, and we could see the damn rusty springs and mechanism, and even the plaque with the phone number of the company that you'd have to call to come and fix the track if it got fucked up, but we'd have to borrow money to fix it, even the guys most excited about the damn ride were fed up, mostly, and their dates were getting kind of sarcastic about not expecting to get out of the fun house in time to have a nice dinner or something, and maybe it would be best if they were just dropped off at home.
  Somehow, after all that, and I don't claim the Dems let them have their way on everything, but they let them have their way on one really big thing that didn't work, very much didn't work, SO much did not work, in fact, that even the "freedom fries" hammerhead was aware of it by the bitter end, and after all that, when it might be imagined that a bit of humility might be squeezed out following the public shaming of both parties after the inexplicable vote for a farce that was like a final exam in a class where we didn't show up for most of the semester, and figured it would be cool because of our exceptionalism, somehow after all that--
  And if I can be allowed another sidebar-- after, incidentally I suppose, after it should have been clear to all that none of this had much of anything to do with conservative philosophy, whether we prefer the noble one that sounds reasonable even when I don't agree with it, or with the one that was apparently kept secret from me in history classes, even the class taught by a kindly old Republican who I really liked, even in that class i never heard about this authentic conservatism where it's more or less treason to try to pry amenities away from the twenty or thirty guys who inherit and spend all the money around here since the founders began this noble experiment; it didn't even have much to do with that version, and was more about the perplexing overreach of a group of white guys whose ivory-tower notion of the world was not appreciably different in character from even that of George Will's most cartoonlike caricature of pointy headed Harvard stereotypes--
  After all of that, the party took a week or two off to recharge their batteries, and returned refreshed and invigorated, cheeks flush with excitement, and hot under the collar about just when WAS Obama going to win HIS war for the loyal Americans among us, tapping our feet impatiently at his incompetence, self-regard, and credulousness with respect to all of the evil in the world. Suddenly they were all  masters of foreign policy, able to detect flaws in a president's decisions with pinpoint accuracy, where before it was practically un-American to question the captain of the ship, until the ship had run aground for some time, and the captain didn't seem to grasp that a ship on solid ground rather than water was a ship that was a ship only in the academic sense, and barely that, due mainly to its being undeniably shaped like a ship (although a cloud of smoke could pull that off), or to its being made more or less from the same physical material as a ship (although any PTA voting for bake sales and then-- and this is key-- HAVING the bake sales, and at least breaking even-- any PTA doing that was made of the same stuff as a government was);
  well, it was different now, though; on their vacation they had discovered that skepticism was the best way, that a president who clearly didn't know what was right should never be given the benefit of the doubt, especially on foreign policy where Republicans are the acknowledged experts, and they shouldn't be questioned. So always the notion that someone shouldn't be questioned; the only issue is who that someone ought to be. Not sure? At any given moment, the Republicans can explain it to you. It annoys them to have to explain it, and they won't make a secret of THAT, but explain it they will. Count yourself lucky if they don't tattoo it on your back like the guy in the Kafka story. (Not the cockroach story, but rather the other one, the one Frank Zappa thought so highly of.) Consider this another example of my elitism that I'm mentioning a foreign author.
  I was supposed to be telling you about the New Yorker article, though, so let me do that before I take off. There's not really that much to say, actually, except that it reminded me that of all of us, Barack Hussein Obama is the one who should be mad about all of that stuff. And he is. But he also understands that for him to indulge in despair would be for him to give up, finally, on this country. And if anyone has an excuse to give up on America, it would be that guy. And he managed, against pretty long odds, to make me excited about America's prospects. Not in the short term, maybe. I'm still a little fuzzy about the timing. But with all the things out there that have been given the tiresome label "un-American," giving up on America would seem to be the most deserving of the word. No matter how stupid it might feel to not just immediately give up. Put it this way-- stupid is in, right now, for Americans, so, when in Rome! And not giving up on America is one of the few shades of stupid that I'm willing to wrap myself in.