PUNCH AND JUDY POLITICS

U.S. Attorney General William Barr appeared before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, and the behavior of the Democrats was embarrassing. They would ask rhetorical questions and then refuse to let Barr answer, over and over, as if attempting to provoke him into saying something rash. I was amazed he was as calm as he managed to be. The closest he came to lashing back was a wry comment about how he thought a hearing meant he was suppose to be heard.

But I myself was seething, when I saw how Barr was treated. There is a thing called “Civil Procedure” which allows differing views to be exchanged, but the Democrats have abandoned it. Actually they abandoned it the moment they began to hold Marxist views, for Marxism is all about seizing power, with no understanding of the concept of truly “sharing” power. In fact three-year-olds at my Childcare know more about sharing than Marxists do, (though some children are like Marxists, in that they are always saying others should share, while sharing little or nothing themselves).

It is better to reduce such behavior to absurdity than to get sucked into a fuming rage. It works with three-year-olds, when I remain calm even as they bulge veins with zealous drama, and I think calm humor is likely the way to deal with Marxists, as well. They seem to want Civil War, and they do not like Civil Procedure.

One humor to use is to lampoon, and an ancient form of lampoon is the Punch and Judy show. It takes serious subjects and reduces them to absurdity. Of course, some are unable to laugh, and scold others for laughing, seeing Punch and Judy’s wife-abuse and husband-abuse and child-abuse as no laughing matter. This is the same sort of person who saw laughable Tom and Jerry cartoons as being very serious, for they imagined the cartoons promoted violence.

My own experience begs to differ, for I have seen the most shy and gentle children, children who are basically afraid of their own shadow, dissolve into gales of delighted laughter when I behave in a “silly” manner which reduces things to absurdity. For example, when a child trips over a root on the forest floor, I may walk over to the root and shake my finger at it, scold it, and give it a kick, and then pretend I hurt my toe, and hop around on one foot while holding the other. Even the child who tripped usually stops wailing about their scraped knees, and laughs. Kicking the root does not “promote violence” as much as it lampoons it.

At this point lampooning is far better way of handling Marxists than a Civil War. Read about what happened in Korea, when their civil war first began. The non-Marxists responded in a manner every bit as ruthless as the Marxists: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth and slaughter for slaughter. (Worst was the fact outsiders made Korea’s domestic disturbance a so-called “proxy war”, rather than truly seeking peace.) We don’t want to descend to that level of hell (unless we absolutely have to.)

Democrats should be easy to lampoon, whether we consider woman’s rights,

Or consider childcare,

Or, most recently, how we respond to law and order:

Laughter can be a great liberator, especially when social discord makes people prone to feeling the fear a little child fears when parents argue, and love slumps towards divorce. Fear sees discord as a looming shadow, while laughter looks down on it from the highlands of love.

Laughter is like a long married couple looking at newlyweds experiencing their first quarrel: The newlyweds are horrified, but long-married lovers look back fondly at all they’ve been through, and say, “Quarreling truly is sad, but making up can be truly wonderful.”

. HORNED LARK SONNET

Do birds have antlers? Young lovebirds lock horns
And in July’s heat twist hearts to the ice
Of divorce. Sweet roses grow savage thorns
And are deaf to my pleas that they be nice.
I say, “You do not want to do that,”
But they reply, “Oh yes, we really do.”
Once they cooked sweet pies; now those pies go “splat”
In each other’s faces. Punch and Judy pursue
A comedy so foolish children laugh
When the clouting is done by mere puppets,
But lovebirds are not puppets; needless wrath
Poisons like Hitler’s and Stalin’s, and gets
All the world weeping, for all souls can see
Love sinking lower than Love ought to be.