Bonusgate, PA politics and cigars
As I sat mesmerized by the PA attorney general Tom Corbett’s remarkable resemblance to Leslie Nielson and half-expected O.J. Simpson or an Elizabeth II lookalike to make a cameo appearance, I was taken aback by several things. First, the cojones of the AG. As he astutely put it to one reporter, he does not care what people might say about political prejudice. This was not an operation aimed at Democrats and he cited several prosecutions against Republican office holders to prove it. This was instead, as he rightly suggested, a sad day for Pennsylvanians. Second, I always find it fascinating to play the numbers game. If you added up the indictment counts and the number of years each dumb fool could potentially serve, it comes to more years than points I have ever racked up in Space Invaders, my arcade game of choice when a wee bairn playing on English seaside piers (with English weather, you do not expect me to sit on shingled beaches, do you?). Third, I marvel at the brazen stupidity of our legislators, particularly vacuous Veon. I know, why don’t we construct a list of volunteers, cross-reference, update it and track, probably as an Excel spreadsheet, how much each is getting. That way we can assist the prosecutors. Fourth, I wouldn’t want to be Webb the squealer. He gets immunity and witness protection for the rest of his life, probably as W.Ebb or some other highly inventive name. But above all, I was definitely drawn to the anecdotes: the volunteers who are told to attend a campaign only to ditch the campaign leaflets in the garbage and go fishing, commenting later that they guess, having received $250.00 each, that they must now be “professional fisherman”. Better watch your flies in prison, boys, cause there will be plenty of fishers of men in there who have hooks aplenty for little minnows such as yourselves; then, there is the woman who kinda got fed up with her $78,000 job with the tourist board so thought she would wander off to Beaver County to campaign as a volunteer for five weeks. There will be no Cancun in her horizon although I understand that is a limited view of our fair state between the prison bars. But I am saving my favorite for the end. That would be the affair with the legislative intern, the 21 year old who suddenly fulfiled her lifetime dream of earning the princely sum of 21G’s, rising to 29G’s, by working over a cigar shop. Now, first of all, she wasn’t exactly ambitious in only trying out a PA legislative member; she is no ambitious Monica for sure. But then she did understand the value of a cigar, well, at least a shop that fronted as one in my neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Yet, I ask you, dear reader. Is it just me, or do we see a nefarious connection here with the smoking ban story? This affaire de coeur or in dem pants/ies takes place in Allegheny County whose attempt to control its own indoor air quality has been struck down by the Commonwealth court in May of this year when it was argued that only the state legislature had the authority over this matter. This has been a contentious issue in the state this summer as numerous newspapers have reported. The ban was eventually passed on June 11 2008 and smoking in public places including restaurants is now verboten. But there is pride still at stake. Philadephia, after all, has been allowed to keep it more restrictive policies in place. But now Allegheny County can be proud because it has its own special place in smoking lore, providing fronts for y-fronts and proving that a cigar shop really isn’t a cigar shop. The irony is that one dirty secret, as smoking has now become, was hiding another dirty secret, an idea as old as Virginny tobacca, the inevitable coupling of sex and politics. It reminds me of a story I covered in my surveillance class this semester, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. The novel opens in the dingy streets in London. Mr. Verloc, a double agent, lives in a house that doubles as a business. It’s a front, but its trade? Low level porn sold out of brown paper bags. Peddling porn, peddling taxpayer’s money for a fumble above a cigar shop. Equally tawdry, equally sad. The difference? It only costs a few dollars to buy the novel, whereas it has cost us no end of hard earned money to fund indiscretion. You draw the conclusions.
Chris Orchard
