Before I get to this month’s meat-of-the-matter, please allow me to discharge these two unrelated observations: #1: Del Mar’s been pulling in the rubes and zombies to their races due in no small part to their use of the word “cool” twice in their advertising taglines. #2: For you radio wave/ brain alteration/conspiracy theorists out there — it has been established that the only English-speaking Americans who do not use the word “cool” between 100 and 400 times a day are those who have never owned cellphones. And that tiny number is quickly diminishing as Operation Payphone Holocaust nears its successful conclusion.
Ah. Thank you.
I’ve never thought that politics has any real place in Hosing Down, especially when there are so many other facets of life more worthy of crass exploitation. So please bear in mind that, as I now share my thoughts on the Filner Follies, my focus is not political, but more concerned with something I like to call the Human Biological Imperative.
I write this in mid-August, when the very air is rife with accusations, obfuscations, negotiations; by the time you read this perhaps the entire mess has been settled. Perhaps our long municipal nightmare is finally over and the 17 (current) victims can finally begin thinking of hopping aboard the choo-choo train to Happyland.
No, not without an 18th victim — one so unlikely, so shocking, yet so wounded that leaving him behind would in itself be an unconscionable crime.
Him? Did I just write him?
Yes. I am that 18th victim.
It started the night after I heard the first chilling accusations — the mayor’s lecherous, snake-like tongue probing the unwilling windpipes of outraged, helpless victims. I felt sadness and compassion and outrage, naturally, but was oblivious to the diabolical power of the frank descriptions of such frisky activities.
My sleep became ravaged by nightmares. Four or five times a night my body would fling itself off the bed and onto the floor or out the window and down into the pool as I frantically screamed, “The tongue! The tongue! Oh God no, the tongue!” Neighbors would call medical services… night after night I struggled to stay awake rather than risk experiencing another wrenching nightmare. My health declined, my thoughts were truly tortured… until one blessed morning when I decided I’d had enough. I devised a plan that would allow me (at least figuratively) to confront this horror face-to-face.
Within 30 minutes I was standing in the chilly meat department of the local grocery store, examining a package containing the wrenched-out tongue of a dead cow. I wondered: was Filner’s tongue like this? No, his was alive, wasn’t it? But like this packaged one, I was sure the mayor’s tongue also glistened with a single shared characteristic… it, too, was lonely.
Later that day, some hot young housewife would purchase this lonely dead cow tongue, take it home, heat it up, and allow it to slide its way down her throat… and maybe her husband’s and children’s as well — a true tongue fest for today’s progressive family. Perfectly legal as well; as the receptive party, the tongue tango was the family’s idea and was used in conjunction with the late cow’s implied oral contract upon its entering the slaughterhouse (see the People vs. Clairabelle 1957 etc.)
The problem with the mayor’s tongue is that it is demonstrably developmentally challenged. Or to be a bit clearer, it is essentially retarded, lacking knowledge of social graces and concepts such as action/consequence. When one’s heart threatens to bleed, it is wise to have a band-aid at hand.
It is in this spirit of compassion and pragmatism that I am now able to withdraw my identity as Victim #18. Studying that tongue among the refrigerated meats that morning allowed me to understand something substantial about our mayor, something I might be willing to reveal and share on a lecture circuit, in exchange for reasonable compensation. In the mean time, the devastating nightmares have ceased and my health is beginning to improve. In place of Victim #18 now stands Survivor #1… and proudly.
I must now step up to the imaginary plate of humility and say something I thought I never could or would:
Thank you, creepy Gloria Allred.
Without the reknown publicity-chaser’s injection into the Filner Media Circus, we would have been deprived of a moment of sublime local news idiocy.
I won’t identify the co-anchors or the station (unless you ask me personally) but what follows is pretty close to what went out live a couple of days after Allred instigated a lawsuit against Filner on behalf of one of the shamefully-wronged victims.
The male (M) and female (F) anchors converse:
M: …and this lawsuit could well be seeking financial damages.
F: One thing that, surprisingly, people haven’t been addressing, is the fact that if Mayor Filner resigns, that would pretty much nullify the lawsuit, wouldn’t it?
M: Um….well…uh, I don’t think that’s actually how it works [quickly changes focus]
Now wouldn’t ya know it — the female co-anchor not only has long tenure but very long blonde locks. Stay cute, San Diego.
There is something else that continues to trouble me in this sordid saga that divides our city and threatens our reputation as a bayside town with a tortuous New York City envy complex. This trouble has to do with the many on-the-record victims, none of whom deserved the sort of behavior they encountered.
Just as the feminist movement involved empowerment, so has sexual harassment been a front-and-center topic for over 30 frigging years. “It cannot be tolerated! It will not be tolerated!” was a cry that actually made me tingle in certain places every time I heard it during these past decades. The sisters are united; the cretins will not get away with it anymore! Report it immediately to the proper authorities so that the offender is stopped dead in his tracks and so that no other sisters will be left at risk!
It just seems to me that something went awry in the case of Mayor Bob. I mean something else, something unexamined. Did not the first chronological victim have the opportunity to reveal and put an end to the reprehensible behavior and in so doing, spare all the victims who followed her a lot of grief?
And the same then goes to Victim #2, then #3, and so on. Wherefore a conspiracy of silence, and for so long?
It boggles the mind that they weren’t all blondes.
