Sultan Knish
In 1967, folk singer Arlo Guthrie played a song on a left-wing New York
City radio station that was supposed to sum up the cultural difference
between the culture and the counterculture.
On
one side of the moral equation in Alice’s Restaurant you had Office
Obie and the nameless army officers who were rulebound fascists and on
the other side you had the easygoing hippies who believed in community,
hanging out and letting things slide. Culture would drag you into court
for littering with twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs as
evidence while counterculture would shrug and invite you to dinner.
Culture was bureaucratically and violently absurd. Counterculture was humanely lovingly absurd.
That's
still the image that the left likes to wear like an old pair of jeans.
It's still just a bunch of easygoing fellows out to build community and
take on Officer Obie’s senseless repressive rules. But then the
counterculture became the culture and the left became Officer Obie.
Or President Obie.
If
there's anyone who's going to drag you into court with twenty seven
eight-by-ten color glossy photographs as proof; it's going to be the
Officer Obies of the EPA. Except that a straightforward thing like
littering would be much too sensible for environmental enforcement
groups to bother with. They're more likely to arrest you for collecting rainwater on your own property, making a guitar out of unfinished wood or cleaning up trash from your own property.
EPA Administrator Al Armendariaz,
whose fiefdom included five states, told staffers that his philosophy
of enforcement was borrowed from the Romans."They’d go in to a little
Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and
they’d crucify them."
Compared to the Officer Obies of the ruling
counterculture, the original model seems like a humanitarian and the
soul of reason. If you ran afoul of Officer Armendariz, or Caesar
Armendariz as he liked to be called, you would be very lucky to come
away with nothing more than a twenty-five dollar fine and a few hours in
jail.
A mere two decades after Arlo Guthrie began singing about
being arrested on Thanksgiving for littering by Officer Obie, John
Pozsgai was sentenced to three years in jail for “discharging pollutants
into waters of the United States" for the crime of adding topsoil to his land.
And
you can be sure that the evidence for the legal case which went on in
varying forms for twenty years consisted of a lot more than a mere
twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with a paragraph of
text on the back.
There's a folk song in there alright, but it's
not one that a liberal would listen to because every progressive who
grins when hearing Arlo joke about a federal case being made out of
throwing some garbage off a cliff would want to hang him in real life.
Bill Ellen, a Vietnam veteran and conservationist who ran a shelter for injured wildlife, spent six months in jail
for making duck ponds based on a 1989 reinterpretation of environmental
law which stated that land which had water on it for seven days was
considered Federally protected wetlands.
"That's as close as you
can come to restitution for them, the ducks," the judge in the case
declared. The judge has since retired to a more fitting post as a member
of the Governor's Advisory Panel on License Plate Reader technology.
There's probably a folk song in that, but no one would ever air it.
Assistant
U.S. Attorney Jane F. Barrett called it
"a premeditated environmental crime" and declared victory even though
Ellen was only sentenced to six months in jail instead of three years.
"It
might be true that five years ago Ellen wouldn't have to go to jail.
But we're living in a different world now," she admitted.
And
that different world is the world that progressives have made. They
have made America into a nightmarish place that would horrify even
Officer Obie. A place where you don't just go to jail for trashing
public property, but for cleaning up your own.
Ellen's own
Officer Obie has moved on to be the Director of the Environmental Law
Clinic at the University of Maryland. Despite donating a few thousand
dollars to Obama, she has yet to get the US Attorney gig that she had her eye on.
Doubtlessly
though President Obie is sure to find a place for any legal eagle who
can try to send a Marine Corps vet with two young children to jail for
three years over a duck pond.
But the final Officer Obie touch was yet to come.
The
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reviewed the case
and declared; "That Ellen believes that an offense of this magnitude is
trivial or unimportant ironically exemplifies the need not to foreclose
punishment by imprisonment."
The need to sentence a man to
prison for a trivial offense because he believes rightly that it is a
trivial offense is the definition of irony only behind the Iron Curtain.
But in a more fitting definition of irony, the judge responsible for
writing that decision lost his shot at a Supreme Court spot because he
couldn't stop talking to the New York Times about being considered for
the Supreme Court.
The justice of the Officer Obies, Judge Obies
and President Obies may be blind, deaf and dumb; but sometimes a higher
court than the Supreme Court intervenes with its own judgement.
The
different world that U.S. Attorney Jane F. Barrett gleefully inhabits
where a man may be sent to jail for a duck pond wasn't made by Officer
Obie and the culture, but by the counterculture. If the laws of the
culture made sense but were guilty of overreach, the laws of the
counterculture are all overreach with no sense. The laws of the
counterculture are every bit as addled as its art and its literature.
Seven
years after Gibson Guitars worked with Arlo Guthrie to reconstruct
Woody Guthrie's guitar and sell reproductions of it, a gang of Officer
Obies burst into its Nashville factory with guns drawn looking for wood.
And they did it again two years later accusing Gibson of making guitars
out of wood that was not finished by Indian workers.
Both times
the raids happened under the regime of President Obie who is the living
culmination of everything that the counterculture hoped for. And what
they hoped for was Officer Obie writ large with a teleprompter in one
hand and an infinite rule book in the other.
The laws of the
culture were rational. The laws of the counterculture are emotional.
They exist because someone demanded them vehemently enough.
The
pursuit of that humane and caring system instead gave us a system that
sends men to jail for the unrepentant manufacture of duck ponds. It
turned every Federal employee into Officer Obie and made Officer Obie in
his various guises as environmental crusader, financial regulator and
political activist with revolving door roles in government agencies into
a progressive superhero.
The counterculture heroes aren't rebels
anymore. They are the protectors of the values of the counterculture
who suppress opposition by dissenters who don't want to buy health
insurance, uppity photographers who don't want to take pictures at gay
weddings and free spirits who build duck ponds without the proper
permits.
In the culture, laws were made by men and carried out by
professionals who understood the laws they were executing. In the
counterculture, laws were made by activists and then modified by
regulators and bureaucrats so many times that both the aforementioned
trials involved extensive debates over what law was broken, whether it
was broken and whether the law that may have been broken even existed.
In
the counterculture the sheer morass of laws, regulations and
interpretations of both means that there really is no law, only whim. No
one ever knows what the law is. They only know whom they want punished
and why.
Ridicule a law enough and it stops applying. Demonize a
defendant enough and he is guilty. Truth is nothing. Emotion is
everything. The humanitarian creativity of the counterculture was
egotism dressed up in philosophy. It wanted what it wanted. And what it
wanted, it got.
ObamaCare or ObieCare is based on a million
regulations that no one understands holding up an oppressive system
based on wishful thinking that can't work. President Obie is the perfect
leader for an ideology that wants its fascist overreaches and abuses of
power cloaked in cheerful grins and empty talk about sharing and
community whose practical implications are defined in implementable
legalese on Page 2809, subparagraph 81b, footnote 311 which no one has
read.
Under the liberal Officer Obies, you can't get what you
want at Alice's Restaurant. Not unless it meets State and Federal
regulations, has listed calorie counts and doesn't contain any
transfats. You can't get the health plan you want under ObieCare and you
can't get much of anything else either except a lecture, a reeducation
program or a prison term.
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