Bring me the head of Grover Norquist.
And I’m not too picky about whether the body’s attached.
We already knew he was a menace. This smirking, smooth-talking moral vacuum, this avaricious monster who masks his pathological greed as a pathological hatred of anything smacking of “gummint,” this peddler of shopworn lies who wants us all to believe that government is Something Else, some Other outside our control, that civic life and civic duty are beyond us, who wants us to think we are disempowered so that we will join him in smashing the very hallowed institutions that have empowered us all for centuries. This thug who hates anything and everything that looks like the America we know and love. This walking Enclosure Act, whose shit-smeared grin reeks with the tragedy of the commons. This parasite, whose glossy coat depends on the hatred he can churn up against people much better than himself. This nasty, hollow wretch who has forgotten if he ever knew what government is for, who actively works to prevent others from leaving this world a better place than they found it.
This traitor.
And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I don’t mean it in the sense that he stands against everything I want this country to be—though he does. I mean it quite literally. I mean it in a Section 3 of Article III of the United States Constitution kind of way. If what John Loftus alleges is true, Grover Norquist has levied war against us. He has adhered to our enemies. He has given them aid and comfort.
He is a traitor.
We know why the mindless school of piranhas currently passing for the right wing in this country plays the game they do. In pressing for impeachment of a Democratic president on laughably flimsy—on insultingly hypocritical grounds, they have made that tool much harder to use, raised the bar necessary to clear before we will undergo that grinding process. In heightening the contradictions of our public discourse, flinging “treason” and “traitor” around with appalling carelessness, they have weakened those words, cheapened them, removed the teeth and claws we need to rip this rot out of our lives. “Oh, it’s just more partisan bickering,” the chattering classes will chatter. “He said, he said. On the other hand. In the balance. It remains to be seen.” And we will push against this apathy, and maybe something will happen, eventually. Maybe he’ll stay where he is, muddied but unbowed. Maybe he’ll resign and take up a less-visible post in a think-tank. Maybe he’ll run away to fight another day, maybe he’ll take up running state-wide initiatives to weaken state governments, instead: faux-populist scams designed to siphon off contributions from gullible six-packs while pissing on the foundations of the civic pride he affects to love. Maybe he’ll write a book.
That isn’t good enough. Not for me. Not anymore.
I want Grover Norquist destroyed. I want him smashed like a bowl of eggs. I want his assets frozen as the IRS audits every penny he tried to squirrel away from the greater good. I want the rich clothing stripped from his back, and I want him frogmarched into the town square through a gauntlet of the people whose power he’s leached away, whose lives he’s made that much the worse in countlessly grey little ways, so that they may pelt him with the garbage of their choosing, and then I want him tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail so we can do it all over again. I want him buried up to his neck in the dirt, and I want passersby to be invited to saw at his neck with their W4 forms—their badges of honor as productive, hard-working members of a civil society. I want his face seared into the collective unconscious, so that infants weep at his approach and decent people cry out, “Dear God, what is that thing?” I want him reduced to begging on the street for his bread, so that I can walk up to him and spit in his face and sneer at him to get a job and then hand out twenties to the gutterpunks beside him. I want the name “Norquist” to be as anathematized as “Hitler.” I want his head.
That will do for a start. —After that, I want him in prison. I want him held accountable for his crimes. I want him ground through the soulless, privatized Satanic mills he’s helped make of our penitentiary system with his beast-starving. I want him declared an enemy combatant. I want him pumped full of sodium pentathol so that we can wrench the names of his co-conspirators from his lying tongue. God help me, I want him tortured. I want to know he’s felt one tiny sliver of the pain he’s happily fomented.
I will leave it to better people than I can ever be to forgive him.
Claims of moral clarity are suspect in this world, but here is, at last, a case that’s clearly cut. This—man—is an outlaw. He has no place in decent society. He should be given neither food, nor drink; he should be denied fire and salt. —If there’s evidence disputing these allegations, I’ll entertain it—but if it boils down to merely a rehearsal of extenuating circumstances, of ghastly cynicism masquerading as realpolitik, I will get up from the table and walk away. I will work with anyone who will work to bring him down, in whatever way I can. I will fight anyone who would cover this up or hide it away or ignore it or pretend it is more expedient to work with this putrid blight. We must—we will see the day when this country wakes up from its horrible dream and shudders and asks itself, blearily, over coffee—how could we ever have trusted the word of fools like that?
And God willing, we’ll live on, all of us, to see the day when Grover Norquist’s name is utterly forgotten. When we no longer need him as a bogeyman, as an example of a mean life poorly lived, as a cautionary tale.
But first: bring me his God-damned head. —After that, we can start the long hard work of undoing the damage his ilk has wrought.
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Me, too.
Management is wishy; management is washy; management still clings to outmoded, cosmopolitan, bootlessly rootless internationalist ideals, which render "treason" (if not "terrorism," or "betrayal of one's ideals") as quaintly anachronistic; management has had second thoughts about a specific charge rendered in the above, even if management still cherishes some of the turns of phrase; management humbly requests you follow up by reading "Climbing up and climbing down"; and now, management really must get up from the computer and go with the Spouse to buy some shelves.
But thanks.
Yes! Someone bring him Grover's head.
let me get it. you want the whole thing? or wouldn't be fun just to have the lower mandible first. bring you pieces, i will...
Fool! What "very sacred institutions that have empowered us for centuries" has Grover Norquist attacked? The IRS?